Felix Fortuna
by Chartic
Summary: Scion's been killed and the world's been saved. Fantastic! Less fantastic: Contessa realizing she's about to spend the rest of her life dodging Legend and assassination attempts. She decides she's going to be happy, even if that means starting all over again in a different world...
1. Chapter 1: Second Time's the Charm

Author's Notes: This story is dedicated to Maroon_Sweater, whose love for Contessa burns with the heat of a thousand suns.

Acknowledgements: I'd like to thank Maroon_Sweater, Pericardium, and Poe for helping me work on this. They're as much the author as I am and it wouldn't have been nearly as good as it is without them.

* * *

Contessa stood on the edge of the beach like an indecisive baby turtle. She'd slung her jacket over her shoulder and tilted her hat up. The wind teased her hair and ruffled her undershirt as the crest of the tide brushed the tip of her shoes.

Thirty years had passed almost as quickly as her village had collapsed. The experiments, the planning, building networks of contacts, working with the Doctor; all of it felt so recent. So fresh. But it was over now, and it was time for her to move on.

Everything had been arranged. The portal, the body, the supplies scavenged from Cranial and Bonesaw's old workshops. She looked down at the Tinkertech device in her palm. On the surface were knobs and screws and buttons that she couldn't make sense of, but her power could. She flipped two switches and cranked a dial all the way to the right. It thrummed in her hand and she felt as though she'd pulled the pin of a live grenade.

"The saltwater will destroy your extremely expensive custom leather shoes."

"No," Contessa replied, pocketing the tech. Behind her, the speaker strode across the loose sand. "It won't."

"We could have had this conversation somewhere easier to get to," said the Number Man as he finally reached her at the water's edge. He had rolled up his pants legs like a dork and was holding his shoes and socks in one hand, also like a dork. "I had to cancel a lunch date with Jeanne. I trust that you called me out here for something more important than catching up."

Her power told her to wait another few seconds in silence before continuing the conversation. "I'm leaving."

"We've got e-mail now. You could have sent one. 'Dear Kurt, bye. Please watch over my fern. Love, Contessa.' It would have been simpler than camping out on a beach on another earth."

"As someone with a Dali in his office, you should understand clumsy symbolic gestures."

"Fine." The Number Man wiped his glasses on the shirt. They weren't dirty; the adjustment was a subconscious acknowledgement he'd lost the conversation. "When will you be back?"

"I'm _leaving_."

He ceased his fidgeting. "Ah."

"And I would never give you custody of Cato. I wouldn't want him to pick up your bad taste or abominable sense of fashion."

"Am I to assume that I'm the only person you've decided to inform?"

Contessa stayed silent and Number Man sighed to himself.

"You know that no one is going to be happy about this," he said.

She knew he was already thinking of the arguments that were going to erupt the moment he revealed the woman who could do anything had chosen to abandon them.

"Won't they?" she asked. "It seems to me the powers that be don't want my _help_, they want me under their control or dead. Legend whines about 'containing' me to the Wardens at their directors' meeting every month. Dragon has programs running to keep an eye on me. There are four major organizations that plan to kill or capture me in the next week, and Teacher—"

Number Man pounced on this. "Jeanne and I are concerned about Teacher and the problem he poses for future stability."

"Teacher has been dealt with," she said, using her power to keep her voice perfectly neutral.

"And the students?"

Contessa adjusted her hat. "I suggest you inform the Wardens of Teacher's demise so they may deal with the cleanup."

Number Man sighed again.

She knew he was dreading having to tell Jeanne and Chevalier, how he would have to field complaints about her desertion for months to come. "Tell them over breakfast," she suggested. "If you time it correctly, Legend will choke and get coffee up his nose."

"I suppose it would be an appropriate 'goodbye' from you to give Legend one final headache to deal with."

"Nothing worse than what he gave me when he found out Cauldron wasn't skipping around planting flowers and saving puppies."

She waited for him to mount his objections. He _would_, despite understanding the futility of arguing with her.

"I'm not going to try to talk you out of it," Number Man said diplomatically, preparing to do precisely that. "I want you to know that Jeanne and I intend to see this through. Continue Cauldron's work. If you stayed, we'd back you to the hilt."

"Thank you. Your feelings are noted."

Contessa allowed the dismissal to fully sink in, then continued, "Scion is gone. The world is getting better and will get even better under Jeanne's guidance. I am no longer necessary."

"I understand why you're doing this," he said, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. "But we will have some very awkward conversations with the Wardens for the next year."

"It will be awkward, but I deemed this the least troublesome way to tell everyone." She paused. "Thank you."

"Of course. I'll just say you decided to nap on a beach for the foreseeable future," he said, and reaffixed his glasses. "Although I doubt this will keep anyone from trying to find you."

"They can try. They'll fail."

"And were you planning on telling me how exactly you're doing this?"

Contessa mentally stumbled. She consulted her power. It let her know that she would not put Number Man or Citrine in real danger if she shared the minor details of her plot with him. The only person insane enough to fight a heavily fortified city and simultaneously destabilize the financial markets of all earths at once for a hint at her whereabouts was dead in a pool of his own piss. Anybody else he told wouldn't believe him anyway.

"There are still worlds left unaccounted for. Worlds Scion didn't even touch. Safe havens where humanity was kept completely clueless about what was happening. One girl among billions won't stick out. And I am very good at avoiding notice."

"One girl?"

"One woman."

The awkward little shuffle that accompanied her words didn't convince him it was a slip of the tongue.

"That would explain Panacea's recent trips from her father's territory."

Contessa didn't deign to comment on his speculation, and he didn't provide more. She checked and Number Man was silently imagining how she would look and act as a child. She managed to contain the urge to deck him.

Number Man waited an appropriate amount of time before ruining the conversation. "The world could still use someone like you."

"Perhaps I don't want to be used."

"Perhaps not," he said. "But perhaps you believe another world could use someone like you more."

She scowled at the sea. "I plan to have a normal childhood this time."

"Whatever it is you plan on doing, enjoy it. You've more than earned it." Number Man turned to her for the first time in the conversation, his mouth set in a frown and his eyes dull even as he offered a hand. "I suppose this is goodbye."

She took his hand, pulling him towards her. He reluctantly put one arm around her, and she grabbed his other arm and forced him to give her a proper hug. "Goodbye, Kurt."

"Goodbye, Contessa. Good luck, wherever you may find yourself."

"Have a nice life."

She released him and watched him go, heading up over the dunes until he disappeared behind one. Her fingers traced the device in her pocket.

"Good luck," she murmured.

Contessa pressed the final button and everything went black.

* * *

Fortuna woke up.

She lay in bed staring at the wall, somewhat conscious but lacking the will to actually get up. It had been one of those dreams again. Herself and a man, talking. Fragments stuck out to her: the water on her shoes, her irritation, the hug at the end. The harder she tried to remember, the faster the memory faded: the man's appearance grew fuzzy and the conversation dissolved into white noise. Eventually, it was gone, leaving only the vaguest sense a dream had occurred.

The only memories that ever stayed were the bad ones.

Her roommate, Ash, had gone downstairs already. She rolled out from under the sheets and fell over the side of her bed, landing in a crouch. It had only taken one time landing on Ash that she checked with her power every time before doing it.

The attic was cramped, occupied by a bunk bed, two cabinets, a hanging rack, and four stacks of boxes. The Simmonses hadn't cleaned anything out when they'd put their first orphan up there, and had deemed it good enough for their second as well. It was tight living, but not painfully so.

She checked what she needed to know right now. Her family was awake, breakfast wasn't ready, and there was a strange woman visiting today. Fortuna asked and found that, yes, it would be fine to wear her Princess Luna hand-me-down sweater and faded black pajama pants. She grabbed her hat from the bedpost and was putting it on when one of her foster brothers, Max, poked his head in.

"You up? Mr. Simmons says there's someone downstairs for you."

"Okay."

As he disappeared down the ladder, she straightened her fedora in the mirror. The hat was crisp and clean, without the usual creases and tears that blemished the hand-me-down clothes she and her siblings wore. Once she was satisfied, she touched her pocket knife. It had never left her side and never would; it was better to be safe than sorry.

She popped the attic door open and climbed down the ladder onto the second floor. The Simmonses' house was a mess of bodies, furniture, and possessions. They had adopted seven orphans over the years in a house that was barely big enough for four and had accumulated the belongings and clutter of ten. The hallway was lined with doors, some open, some shut, but all filled to the brim.

Fortuna weaved between Sam and Kris, the two seven-year olds who were the latest additions to their family, playing tag in the hallway, and skipped over piles of discarded toys and dirty laundry. When she reached the staircase, she could see her foster father making conversation with an older woman at the bottom.

Fortuna clasped the handrail and launched herself over to land gracefully on the floor below.

Mr. Simmons was a man with a body like a bowling ball and a head like a bowling pin. His face was bright red most days from running after children to keep them out of trouble. It was bright red now, as he startled at her sudden appearance.

"I really wish you wouldn't do that," he told her for what must have been the hundredth time.

Fortuna didn't respond, instead looking expectantly between the two adults.

He shook his head and gave up that battle. "Fortuna, this woman works at a boarding school in Scotland. They noticed your test scores and think you'd be a good fit."

It came as no surprise that her academics had garnered interest —she'd been getting straight As in her classes ever since that first teacher had put that first pencil in her hand and asked her to shade bubbles. She'd understood only half of the questions, but her power had filled in the rest.

"Good morning, Miss Floris. It's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Professor McGonagall, one of the teachers at Hogwarts."

This woman was tall, even for an adult. She looked like an extra on Downton Abbey, one whose prolonged exposure to subpar storytelling had worn her down like sandpaper. She had the type of dress that looked forty years out of style—but with how old she appeared, may have just been bought when it was fashionable.

McGonagall extended her hand and Fortuna gave it a firm shake. It was important to make a good first impression. McGonagall reached into her pocket and produced a thick envelope sealed with wax and handed it to her.

Fortuna looked down at the address.

_Ms. F Floris. The Attic. 107 Bassett Street. Fulbourn. Cambridgeshire._

They knew that she lived in the attic? Fortuna glanced up at the Professor, who had a reserved smile on her face.

"Hogwarts has produced some of the greatest talents of this generation, Ms. Floris, and it would be a pleasure to have you grace our halls in September. I'm hoping you'll allow me to discuss what Hogwarts could offer someone with your talents."

"Sounds like a great opportunity," Mr. Simmons butted in. He paused. "It _would _be good to have the extra space and one less mouth to feed. Oh, but I don't want to be the one making that decision for you."

She could take a hint.

A crash came from upstairs, and Mr. Simmons winced. "It's all up to you," he emphasized.

"If there's something you need to take care of, I would be happy to speak alone with Ms. Floris," McGonagall said. "We'll need to discuss some of the things that make Hogwarts unique, as well as why she was chosen and what her studies would cover. It's a big decision to be made at her age and it will take some time to go over everything."

With a hasty thank you, Mr. Simmons hurried away, and the two women were left alone. Fortuna had barely noticed the end of that conversation. She'd asked three questions after being handed the letter. What did the school teach? _Magic_. Really? _Yes_. Would she be happy if she went?

_Yes_.

"Would you like to move somewhere more comfortable?" McGonagall asked.

"Yes," Fortuna said, "I would like that very much."


	2. Chapter 2: A Very Lonely Train Ride

**Trigger Warning: Violence and body horror. If you're uncomfortable with that, please skip the italicized section.**

The Simmonses were apologetic but clear: they didn't have the time to take her to King's Cross. Mrs. Simmons gave her a crumpled five-pound note for the bus and a pat on the head for good luck, and Mr. Simmons moved her belongings to the front porch before Fortuna could point out that five pounds would not take her the sixty miles to London.

Max, Kris, and Sam were sitting on the worn-out couch watching television as she followed their guardian out.

"Where are you going?" Sam asked. The others' heads turned towards her.

"I'm leaving for school," she said. After a moment, she added, "I'm not going to come back for a while."

"Oh, okay."

They all turned back to the TV. Fortuna stood waiting for them to say goodbye and only moved after Mr. Simmons asked, "Did you forget something?"

The door shut behind her and she stood on the porch, surrounded by all her worldly belongings. She used her power to balance a duffel bag on top of a pet carrier sitting on her trunk without spilling it all and tottered to the end of the sidewalk before turning back for one final look.

The house was a hideous off-white, with paint peeling off the side panels and long-forgotten toys peeking out of the patches of overgrown weeds. She felt as much of a stranger here as when she had arrived three years ago, soaking wet in the rain and utterly alone.

There was a bus stop down the street, and she had to get there early in case there were any issues with the notoriously unreliable public transit system and her lack of funds. When she placed her baggage on the ground by the sign, she found that the bus schedules posted were a confusing, jumbled mess of numbers and times, so she asked herself for the quickest bus to the train station.

One step: hold out her wand.

The magic bus that came trundling down the road was a surprise, but a welcome one. The inside was a little odd, filled with tables and chairs instead of benches, but at least the people inside weren't any different from non-magic ones. Vagrants sat around muttering to themselves, men in dress clothes ignored everything except their papers, and the driver sat at the front driving haphazardly and jabbering away.

The difference was in the details. When the vagrants talked to themselves, something answered. The men wore robes instead of suits, and the papers had pictures that moved about like the television. This driver didn't bother the paying passengers and instead traded quips with a talking head that hung from the mirror.

Then the bus took off, careening its way through the countryside, and Fortuna had to use her power to stay put in her seat. This didn't stop her kitten from waking up and yowling his displeasure, and several of the other passengers shot her dirty looks.

She ignored them and reached through the bars of the carrier to scritch his ears. The Hogwarts orphaned witches fund had only enough to cover what she needed without any frivolous extras, but while walking past the pet store, she'd just happened to catch sight of a little gray kitten looking out of the window.

There had been plenty of other kittens, but they were sleeping snuggled up together or playing with each other. This one had been sitting by itself off to one side. When they'd made eye contact, the kitty had stood up, wobbling on unsure legs, and flattened its nose against the glass.

Fortuna had forced McGonagall to stop while she argued with her power. She'd asked if she should get a cat and the answer was no. The second, slightly modified question told her the same. The third, fourth, and fifth were no different. It was the ninth question that had finally yielded a yes, with dozens of extra steps than she'd have followed otherwise.

One of the steps was buying a cheap used trunk, slightly too small for Hogwarts' extensive list of books and potion materials, so she could afford the kitten. In fact, the only new thing she'd purchased was her wand—beech, dragon heartstring, eight inches long, reasonably supple. Ollivander had called it a wand of great power and artistry, but warned that it could easily be turned to dark magic. His words had made her uneasy, so she decided to put the wand in the same category as the other weapon she carried. It was too long to fit in the same pocket as her knife, so she stuck it in the back pocket of her slacks.

Looking out the window was a recipe for motion sickness, so she devoted her attention to soothing her cat. When they arrived at King's Cross, she thanked the driver sincerely when she got off and he smiled, laughed, and told her to come back any time.

She promised she would as soon as she got the opportunity, though she wasn't sure that was altogether true.

The train station had no Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. It did have trolleys, so Fortuna wheeled her stuff around to avoid looking like an overburdened porter. She led herself to a solid, brick wall and asked if it was really a good idea to run face-first into it. Instead of suffering a permanent brain injury, she went straight through and found herself in a hidden station, with a red train sitting dormant on the tracks.

She was the only person there besides a man sweeping away rubbish. He gave her a strange look and went back to his work. Fortuna asked where everyone else was and realized it was only eight o'clock. She'd arrived several hours too early.

She went on board and got a compartment for herself—the best one, no one was there to say no. Once she placed her kitty-carrier to her side and secured her trunk in the luggage rack, she dove into her duffel to retrieve one of the medieval mystery novels she'd crammed among her clothes and other non-magical belongings.

_A Morbid Taste for Bones_ was second-hand, and the pages were worn and yellowed. She had gotten halfway through before Ash had told her to "turn that bloody light off." Her mind had been awhirl all through the night and during breakfast, and it had taken a monumental effort not to cheat and ask her power who'd done it.

By the time she reached the end, the first groups of people had begun to trickle onto the platform, all of them in bunches—happy families with proud parents and kids excited to start another year of schooling. She used her power to check on her foster family and discovered that Lee had occupied her bunk within fifteen minutes of her departure.

When she was thirty pages into _One Corpse Too Many_, a boy her age opened the door. His hair was sandy and elegantly styled, and he wore glasses a bit too large for his face. He sat down across from her and introduced himself.

"Candidus," he said, presenting his hand. "Candidus Craven."

She finished her paragraph before returning his greeting. He settled back and started going through a book of his own, and they amicably ignored each other.

It didn't take long before the door opened again and a girl poked her head in.

"Hey, you bagging that seat?" she asked, gesturing to the empty space next to Candidus, who set his book down.

"Be my guest," Candidus said.

"Cheers!"

The girl hefted a heavy trunk into the carriage. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail with a neon green scrunchie, and the sleeves on her bright orange tracksuit were rolled back to show off her prominent muscles. Despite its weight, she lifted the trunk with ease and set it on one of the racks above them, before addressing Fortuna.

"Jesus Christ, you alright? You look paler than a mother in a morgue."

"What?" Fortuna asked, working through the girl's comment.

"Hah! Just having a laugh, mate. Name's Jessica," she said, turning to Candidus and patting his shoulder a bit too roughly.

"Candidus," the boy replied with a grimace, wiping where she had touched him.

Jessica turned to Fortuna. "And you?"

"I'm For—"

The door shot open and a harried girl stood in the entrance. "Got room for one more?"

Jessica nodded and the girl scurried in, slamming the door shut. Candidus winced at the sound, but she was too occupied shoving her truck into a corner to notice. She flopped down next to Fortuna, who barely had enough time to pull her kitty carrier onto her lap.

"Sorry!" she exclaimed. "Everywhere else is just packed! But at least you're the first group of people I've seen not wearing something ridiculous. Angelique, by the way."

"I'm Candidus, Candidus Craven," the boy said with a mock-bow.

"You can call me Jessica," Jessica said, shaking the girl's hand and the rest of her with it.

"Wow," Angelique gushed, "you're pretty strong!"

"Strong enough to whack a sailor!" Jessica said with a hearty laugh.

Angelique stood up and started squeezing the larger girl's arm. "What's the story there?"

"My pop's a bodybuilder, right? He makes sure I don't slack off." She deepened her voice in obvious imitation of the man. "'I don't care if you're a bird or not, you're gonna learn to lift a weight.'"

"I can see that! Do you think you could carry someone?"

As a matter of fact, Jessica thought that she could. She sprang up and the smaller girl latched onto her arm, swinging around like a monkey. Fortuna asked herself if she should be doing that and received a firm _no _in reply. She lunged forward and blocked Angelique from kicking Candidus in the face.

Angelique groaned in disappointment as Jessica set her down, then blinked when she realized she didn't recognize who had swatted her foot. "Where did you come from!"

"Here," Fortuna said.

"Oh my goodness," Angelique said, flopping down in her seat, "I'm so sorry! I didn't even realize you were there."

Fortuna sat back down and hugged her cat's carrier to her chest. "I'm Fortuna."

Angelique leaned forward and looked around the carriage with conspiratorial eyes. "So, are you all… you know, normal?"

Jessica's smile hitched at the comment and Candidus had a sour look on his face.

"My foster parents have never thought so," Fortuna replied.

The atmosphere in the car suddenly became tense. Fortuna looked from person to person, but they were all avoiding her eyes.

Except for Angelique. She sprang up to hug Fortuna but just as her feet hit the floor, the train lurched. Angelique squeaked as she tumbled sideways into Jessica.

"Oh!" she said, scrambling off of her. "I'm so sorry!"

"I'm fine," Jessica said. She rubbed her own ribs gingerly. "These bones could dent steel."

She stood up and helped the excitable girl to her feet. The gesture was partly kindness and partly to hide the tears forming in her eyes.

Angelique sat down and refocused the conversation. "What I meant was, is your family magical?"

Fortuna thought about it. Only a few brief moments had managed to weather the event that had taken the majority of her memories and made her an orphan. Her mother's face smiling down at her. Her father teaching her how to milk a goat. A small cottage with a garden. "No, I don't think they were," she replied.

"Mine neither," Jessica said.

"My family's magical line can be traced fairly far back," Candidus said. "Not that it matters," he added before launching into a tale about how his grandfather was the minister of magic over a hundred years ago and all the wonderful things he had done.

Candidus apparently had an entire encyclopedia of wizarding government trivia memorized, which he shared until interrupted by a woman selling candy. Fortuna didn't bother looking up from the book she'd discreetly picked up about three minutes into the impromptu lecture; forgoing the cash to buy sweets was one of the prices her kitten came with.

As Candidus's story wound down, she finished the last few pages and stashed her book away in the duffel bag. The others had been so caught up in his tale, they hadn't even noticed her reading.

Angelique started cooing at her kitten.

"Aren't you a sweet little kitty? Yes you are, yes you are. What's your name?"

"Harbinger," Fortuna said with a frown. Harbinger was much too dignified to be spoken to in a baby voice.

Angelique squinted at her. "Harbinger is a silly name for a cat."

"It isn't," Fortuna said, booping him on the nose.

He swatted at the offending finger, but she pulled away before he could scratch her.

"My mother never let me have a pet." Angelique held her own fingers out for Harbinger to sniff. "She's always worried about it peeing all over her rug, or getting hair on her clothes, or eating her expensive earrings."

"My owl will meet me at Hogwarts," Candidus said. The three of them looked expectantly at Jessica.

"I've got a toad," Jessica said, leaning forward as though she were about to share a secret. "I call her 'mum.'"

Angelique didn't get the joke, and changed the subject. "Let Harby out," she demanded, brandishing a box of sweets in Fortuna's face. "I want to see him chase these sugar mice."

After checking with her power to make sure Harbinger would be okay, Fortuna placed the carrier on the floor and released him.

Instead of evincing any interest in the candy Angelique spilled over the floor, he jumped into Fortuna's lap and fell asleep.

Angelique grumbled. Sugar mice squeaked and scuttled around her shoes.

"It's because you called him Harby," Fortuna said.

"Well, that was a disappointment. And a waste of good sweets." Candidus reached into his bookbag and withdrew a decorated wooden box. "Chess, anyone?"

Jessica took him up on the challenge, and the game commenced. Angelique chattered the entire time, alternating between commentary and embellished recounts of every game she'd lost, which was also every game she'd ever played.

Fortuna watched in silence as Candidus won three games. "Castle queen's side," she advised Jessica a few moves into their fourth game. With a few well-timed tips—_don't sacrifice that pawn_, _take that bishop with your knight_, _move your queen there_—she guided Jessica to victory.

"Easy to sit back and give advice," Candidus said resentfully, as his king threw down his crown at the feet of Jessica's rook. "How about _you_ play? Unless you're afraid of losing."

Fortuna passed Harbinger's carrier over to Angelique and pulled the chessboard between herself and Candidus. He offered her first and she took it happily. Knight out first, then pawn, then rook. As the midgame developed, it became clear Candidus was trying to take her queen, so she let him. He sacrificed a castle, both knights and a bishop just for her queen and set himself completely out of position. She had him in checkmate eight moves later.

Then, when she tried to return to her books, he demanded a rematch. The pieces reset themselves and this time he claimed white as 'loser's right.' This game was longer, as he sat for minutes at a time thinking through every one of his moves. She checked every now and then to be sure that he was actually planning and not just trying to annoy her.

At some point during the second game, a prefect came by to advise them to change into their robes. Angelique fell asleep halfway through their fourth game. She probably should have eased up on him, but he had called her a coward.

Finally, after his sixth consecutive defeat, Candidus slumped back. "How are you doing this?"

"I see what move you're going to make, then I make a move to counter it before you do it," Fortuna replied. "Then when you counter the move I made, I counter the counter to the move until you don't have any more pieces on the board. And then, you lose."

Candidus crossed his arms and turned to the window, sulking.

"I don't get it either, but you're dead talented," Jessica said.

"Thank you," Fortuna said. She glanced at Candidus. "But Candidus is a great player. I'm just lucky that he isn't noticing the patterns I use."

"Thanks," Candidus said, unbending a little. "Sorry, I just play chess with my dad all the time and even he can't beat me this bad."

"Maybe I'm just using different techniques."

"Maybe."

The train shook as it began to slow down.

"Hey, Angelique, wake up. I think we're getting close," Jessica said, tapping the small girl with her shoe.

"Huh? Already?" Angelique looked around, confused.

Suddenly the driver slammed on the brakes, throwing Fortuna back in her seat, Angelique into Jessica, Candidus into a trunk, and set all their belongings shaking where they were stashed. Harbinger woke up and began meowing, clearly offended at the interruption.

Angelique peered out the window from her new position on the floor. "So… are we there yet?"

Fortuna asked her power. "No, we aren't."

"Then what's going on?"

Her power informed her that the train was letting on guards that had been assigned by the government, and that they would all be searched. She spent a few seconds trying to think of how to explain what was happening and how she knew what was happening before responding. "I don't know."

The torches inside the train dimmed. They couldn't see anything through the windows. The sky was a murky sea of black, and their carriage was silent save for the relentless drumming of rain on glass. The air quickly became cold, so cold that rain turned to sleet and the windows frosted over and their breath emerged in clouds.

Angelique startled at a shape she saw through the train window, and Fortuna leapt to her feet as someone started screaming.

"Who is doing that?" she asked.

Everyone looked at her, too afraid to respond.

She pulled her knife. _I want to know— _

The compartment door slid open. A shadow shrouded in rags leaned in, suspended in midair. It turned to her. She watched, transfixed, as it slowly lifted its rotting fingers and peeled its hood back.

Beneath it was the bloody, dead-eyed face of her mother. A glob of skin and muscle slipped loose from her cheek and slopped down the front of its robes.

"No," Fortuna whispered. "No, no—"

_"No!" Her mother shoved her towards the back of the house. "Get out of here. Run." _

_She couldn't move. A creature, a tumor in the shape of a man—fleshy and gelatinous, with deformed limbs protruding at random from its mass and diseased yellow boils sprouting from its arms, legs and face—stood in what remained of their doorway. Her father was trying to beat it back with a staff, but it didn't seem to even notice the blows._

_It lunged forward, puncturing her father's throat with one swipe of a talon. A splash of blood slapped against her face. Its metallic taste filled her mouth. _

Fortuna recoiled from the creature in rags, but there wasn't anywhere to go. "I want to escape," she thought, but her power failed her for the first time in her life. An alien gray fog billowed across her sight.

_Her mother finally seized her arm and pulled her away. She blinked her father's blood out of her eyes in time to see his legs being ripped from his torso. Her mother opened the back door, hurrying Fortuna out, but another monster smashed into them._

_Her mother tumbled almost halfway down the slope. Fortuna skidded across the grass, stopping only a few yards away. The monster that had hit them lurched forward on five disjointed limbs. Its body, long and narrow like stretched dough, was covered in chitinous scales. Viscous slime oozed and dripped from the cracks, sizzling when it hit the ground._

"What am I seeing?" Fortuna asked herself urgently, willing the fog to clear. "What is this?"

"_Forta," her mother begged as she dragged her broken body across the ground. _"Please, _Forta, run." _

_The beast advanced on her mother, but Fortuna remained still. She lay watching as it reared over her mother and disgorged a torrent of slime over her prone body. The air soon burned with the sulfurous reek of rancid meat. Her mother started screaming a second later. She thrashed violently as the goo liquefied fabric, flesh and bone, but the creature pinned her down. _

Fortuna's chest tightened and she breathed faster and faster, unable to get enough air. _I want to make this stop._ Her power continued to be useless.

_Two hands grabbed her from behind. _

"_Fortuna! We have to go!" her uncle yelled, shaking her. _

_When she didn't get up, he hauled her up himself and slung her over his shoulder. He stumbled forward, trying to put distance between them and the beast even with his game leg. She could only watch as her mother dissolved into an unrecognizable welter._

_Her mother's shrieks turned to gurgles. The beast hinged its jaw and locked eyes with Fortuna._

_She recognized the face that stared back, underneath the chitin and frenzy. It was the face of her best friend. The tears trickling down her cheeks drew valleys in her parents' blood._

Fortuna leaned against the door, her breath coming out in labored gasps. She smashed a hand against the window, unsure if it was really there. "Mama," she whispered.

"Fortuna?"

She spun on her heel and pointed her knife, asking her power how to disable the threat. The fog finally dissipated, revealing one step: _listen_.

"Oi, you nutty bint. Put that thing away before you shiv someone," something yelled at her, waving its arms.

She took a second to recognize the faces that surrounded her belonged to scared children, and another to recognize them as her classmates.

Fortuna grabbed the empty cat carrier from the floor and thrust it between her and the rest of the compartment, dodging Angelique's flailing attempts at a hug. She threw herself into the corner between the edge of her seat and the wall beneath the window, pulled her legs to her chest, and sobbed.


	3. Chapter 3: Sorting Out Feelings

_I want to find my uncle._

_I want to know where my uncle is._

_I want to know if I have an uncle._

_I want to know if I had an uncle._

_I want to identify and locate the man with the bad leg who took me away from my parents' house the day I let them die._

Fortuna sneezed into Harbinger, who had vacated his spot on the floor and crawled into her lap at some point. He was squeezed tightly to her chest in a death grip and his fur was wet from where it was soaking up her tears. He bore these indignities with total equanimity. She matched her breathing to his purrs to ease the knot of tension in her gut.

"They're called Dementors. They guard Azkaban, you know. That's the wizarding prison, where Dark wizards and murderers go. They feed off of happiness. I'm guessing they were searching for Sirius Black, who is the first person in history to escape."

"Do they make everyone else go proper fucking mental?"

"Well, sometimes people with a weak or sensitive disposition find them harder to bear, but it's nothing some chocolate can't clear up. Just don't go to prison, heh heh."

_I want to know why my friend hurt my mother._

_I want to know what happened to my friend._

_I want to know why my friend became a monster._

_I want to know if my friend is still alive._

_I want to know where my friend died._

"Fortuna, I told you to eat the chocolate. You need something to help make yourself feel better."

The compartment door crashed open. "Guys! I found something better than a prefect. It's our Defense Professor."

"I heard someone here had a bad reaction to the Dementors?"

"A professor? Oh, thank Merlin. Yes, sir, it's Fortuna here. She hasn't been talking to us since the Dementors showed up. Is there anything you can do?"

"Has she had any chocolate yet?"

"Yes, professor! Well—no, professor! I've read up on Dementors before and tried to give some to her, but she just knocked it away. She has a knife."

_I want to know what my parents' names were._

_I want to know what my parents were like._

_I want to know if I loved my parents._

_I want to remember why I didn't save them._

"Ah," the newcomer said. "This might require a tad more than chocolate to fix. Dementors don't just suck the happiness out of you. They can also bring forth your worst thoughts, or feelings, or—"

"Your worst memories, professor?" Candidus, again.

"Precisely."

Fortuna lifted her head from Harbinger's matted fur. There was a man in their compartment, shabby, wearing patched robes over an ugly black tweed suit. Angelique was standing just outside the door, staring down at her with wide eyes.

"What did you say?" she asked.

Candidus, Jessica, and the professor turned to look at her.

"I'm sorry?" the man asked.

"What did you say?"

He lowered his voice a little in an attempt to sound more soothing. "I'm Professor Lupin. The Dementors suck the happiness from you, but with that all that's left is the worst of you. Your sorrow, your fears, your most vulnerable and tragic moments. Now, Miss…?"

"Her name's Fortuna sir," Candidus butted in. "And be careful, she has a knife."

"Floris, sir," Fortuna said.

"Miss Floris." Lupin crouched on the floor beside her. "I'm sorry these creatures were your first introduction to the magical world. I hope this won't sour your impression of Hogwarts. You're safe now, I can assure you that the Dementors are gone and they won't be bothering you anymore. The man they've been assigned to search for is not on this train. What's important is that you're feeling alright. We're all worried about you. "

Fortuna allowed him to place a hand on her shoulder. He pressed a piece of chocolate into her palm.

"See, it's going to be okay," he said softly, his gaze level with hers. "You have your cat, you have your friends, you're off to a school of magic. Put this unpleasantness behind you. Have some chocolate. It will help. Now, are you feeling any better?"

"Yes, sir," she said, using her power to make it sound convincing. She needed to get them off her back and take time to think.

"Good. I'd like to have you speak with Madam Pomfrey, but… no, you will have to be sorted first. Perhaps after the feast then. If you still aren't feeling well, please tell a prefect or your head of house. They'll take you straight to her, and there isn't a thing she can't fix. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go check on another student."

Once the professor had left, Fortuna continued to stroke Harbinger as she played back everything he'd said. Dementors made people relive their worst memories, the worst moments that had ever happened to them.

That meant that what she saw had been real, and that meant she had watched her parents die. For someone with her abilities, that was the same thing as killing them.

"Fortuna," Candidus said testily, deciding to deliver the lecture the professor hadn't, "will you please just eat the chocolate? If not for your sake, then at the very least for ours. And what were you playing at, waving that knife around? You shouldn't even be carrying weapons."

She wondered what he thought a wand was.

Angelique gestured encouragingly at the chocolate in Fortuna's hand. "You'll feel better. I know I did!"

_What if I don't want to feel better?_ Fortuna considered dropping the chocolate on the floor.

Instead, she asked for a way to make everyone stop worrying about her. Her power had her eat the chocolate—which irritatingly did make her feel better—and push herself to her feet. She straightened her back, wiped her face, and steadied her voice.

As soon as she was back on her feet, Angelique moved out of the doorway and swooped in for a hug. Fortuna _accidentally_ swiveled Harbinger's carrier in between the two of them as she sat back down. "Thanks," Fortuna said, "for helping me out."

"You're welcome," Candidus said with a wave. "You were just overreacting a bit, with the knife and everything. Dementors are bad, but they aren't that bad. I knew someone older would help sort you out."

"Yes." Her power etched a calm smile on her face. "Maybe you're right."

The others began chattering again, charged with excitement. Everyone had their own theory as to the likely whereabouts of the wanted man, who was apparently a dangerous and unhinged fugitive. Fortuna participated at first, but gradually dropped out of the conversation, only speaking when her power nudged to.

"Fortuna," Angelique said, watching Fortuna sniffle into Harbinger's fur, "maybe you should put Harby down for a while? I can hold him for you."

Fortuna sneezed violently. Her kitten twitched in her lap. "Thank you, but I'm fine."

"Looks like you're a mite allergic," Jessica observed.

"I would not get a pet I'm allergic to," Fortuna said, and rubbed her itchy eyes with the back of her hand.

The rain had only gotten worse since their sudden stop, and by the time they rolled into Hogwarts station and clambered out onto the platform, it was a veritable monsoon outside. The rain came down in sheets so thick that she couldn't see more than a meter or two in front of herself. The students poured off the train, splitting off into streams heading every which way. She resorted to letting her power pick her way through the crowd.

"First years, over here!" a voice yelled to their right. A bearded giant gestured down a muddy trail where students were already slipping and sliding to god-knows-where.

"They can't really expect us to go down there, can they?" Candidus yelled over the roar of the rain and din of other students.

Fortuna judged the danger. Jessica would get down fine on her own and Candidus could figure something out. Angelique, though, would trip over a pit in the dark and hurt herself. Fortuna grabbed Angelique's hands and gave Jessica a nod. "See you at the bottom," she said.

"What, was your grandpa a goat?" Jessica asked. "How the hell are you getting down this?"

Fortuna dragged Angelique behind her, and the other girl followed her without question.

Only Candidus realized what she was about to do. "Knives can't cut rain, Fortuna. Don't—"

Fortuna took one step forward and slid down the slope. Angelique squealed the entire way down, the pitch changing as she alternated between fear and excitement. Fortuna swerved around jutting rocks, errant roots and toppled children, until she finally reached the bottom and stopped herself by propping one foot up on the dock.

Angelique stopped screaming and started clapping. "Oh my goodness, can we do that again?! That was _amazing_."

Fortuna looked up, barely able to make out the form of Jessica stomping her way down the slope, carrying an embarrassed Candidus in her arms.

"Bloody hell, Tony Hawk, where'd you learn to do that!?"

Fortuna shook her shoes over the water, getting the worst of the mud off. A professor would remove the rest on their arrival. "Let's go," she said.

As the storm raged around them, the four of them got into one of the rickety boats that was rocking ominously in the waves. Slowly, the rest of the muddy, weary first years made their way down to the dock and packed the rinky-dink vessels, desperately fighting to stay warm in the wind. The giant looked them over, counting the tightly packed huddles in each dingy on his fingers.

"Right, that's all of you. We're off."

He climbed into a boat of his own, which Fortuna deduced that was buoyed by magic. He set off at a decent clip despite the rain, and the rest of the boats followed behind him like columns of ducklings.

"I'm gonna be cream crackered after all this," Jessica shouted so her voice carried over the storm.

"You're going to be a lot worse than that if the boat tips over," Candidus shouted back at her.

Between the cold and rain, Fortuna could fake trying to stay warm to get out of the conversation.

_I want to know why I can't remember anything._

Again, fog. Why?

Why couldn't she remember? Why had she done nothing but stare? There was nothing she _couldn't_ do. If she wanted to right now, she could steal Jessica's scrunchie and tie Candidus's hair in a pigtail without anyone noticing. Thirteen steps. Easy. Everything was easy.

Her power had always been able to tell her what she wanted to know. She could answer any question, solve any puzzle, uncover any secret with a thought. And now it refused to work for her. They were her own thoughts and feelings, and she was completely blind to them.

_I want to know why I never asked about my parents before._

This was the most shameful part of all. She'd spent three years with a foster family and she'd never thought to ask about her own past any more than she'd thought to tell anyone about her gift. She didn't need her power to know how much trouble showing off or standing out so egregiously she'd tip her hand would cause.

Maybe she'd been scared of knowing. Her parents had died in front of her and she had done nothing but watch. Maybe that was something she just didn't want to remember, ever again, and so her power had drawn a curtain across it.

If that was the case, she was even more of a coward. This was a shame she _should_ bear.

She shifted mental gears to external circumstances. She was the only one in the world with a power like hers, but was she the only one whose parents had died to monsters like the ones the Dementors had shown her? She asked her powers if the two were connected, but saw only more fog.

Maybe there were answers in her case file?

_I want to know why no one ever told me about my parents._

This yielded an answer. First, the foster agency didn't know what had happened or where she had come from; she'd turned up unconscious outside an emergency room, seemingly out of nowhere. Second, the Simmonses hadn't considered it to be worth talking about. Nasty business, repressed memories—best let sleeping dogs lie. Her amnesia wasn't accompanied by physical or functional impairment, the better children's psychologists were in London, and she wasn't causing problems with the other children, so they'd let it go.

The weather raged, yet their boat remained steady on its course. Through the rain, Fortuna could make out the shining windows and rising ramparts of Hogwarts proper.

"Watch your heads!"

Their boat pierced a curtain of ivy. They were now beneath Hogwarts, and the waves began to flatten out as the stone overhang blocked the torrential downpour and biting wind. The cold eased as the boats docked themselves and the soggy mess of children clambered off, leaving behind a trail of puddles and dirt.

The giant brought them up a set of stairs and down a passageway, stopping at a wide set of double doors. He opened them and looked over his shoulder. "I'll be sure to go and get a professor then."

A thunderous clap of the doors punctuated his exit, leaving the kids around Fortuna to point at and whisper about their surroundings.

The humidity in the air started to evaporate most of the miserable atmosphere. Girls to her right were trying to restore order to their messy hair and boys to her left were wiping shoes against the wall to get the dirt off them.

"This place is _gorgeous_," Angelique gushed, gawking at the carved stone and vaulting ceilings that surrounded them.

"Bet you the loos are solid gold," Jessica agreed.

Candidus launched into an explanation on how Hogwarts came to be, the Founders and their virtues, and the quirks of the castle they'd erected—the friendly ghosts that wandered the hallways, the flights of stairs that shifted of their own accord, the talking portraits, the enchanted ceiling in the Great Hall.

Fortuna stared at the doors. Her power had gotten her this far, at least for those paths it bothered to show. She had weathered her officious classmates and her well-meaning professor and the Dementor itself. Just a little longer. The feast, Lupin had said, and then bed. Two more hours. She could survive two more hours.

The doors opened and a man not much larger than the first years he was facing bustled through them. "Ah, good. I'm glad to see everyone here. I hope the little storm outside hasn't _dampened_ anyone's spirits." He looked around, expecting mirth.

Candidus guffawed.

"Here," the man said, pulling his wand and giving it a wave, "perhaps this will help."

The water sprang from their clothes and slithered off like snakes and the dirt that caked their robes formed clumps that hopped their way down the stairs.

"Well, I'm hoping I see a few more smiles out of you now. I'm Filius Flitwick, the head of Ravenclaw, and I'm eagerly waiting to meet all the bright young students in my house this year. Please keep up, the Sorting awaits!"

Surprisingly quick, Flitwick hurried the group down another set of hallways and through several more doors before coming to an entranceway to put all others to shame. Flitwick pushed them open without a hint of strain, and the air shook with the roar of hundreds of excited teenagers.

"Come now, follow me," Flitwick said, leading the group down the rows of talking students, most eyeing them as they made their way to a hat sitting on a stool.

After a song and resounding applause, everyone grew quiet and Flitwick unrolled a parchment. "When I call your name, please come up, sit down and place the hat on your head. Amica, Louise!"

"I guess we'll see each other after sorting." Angelique fidgeted as she watched students proceed to the stool one by one. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if we were in the same house!"

"Yeah, would be good if my bunkmates weren't a band of pillocks and tossers," Jessica said with a smile.

"Unlikely, but I'll try to keep up with everyone," Candidus lied.

Fortuna read him like a book. He did not intend to keep up with Angelique, whom he had dismissed with contempt within a few seconds of meeting. He was too set in the ways of his world and class to give Jessica an honest chance, and he intended to outright avoid her, whom he viewed as unstable.

Fortuna's power showed them what they expected to see, which was a brief smile and a nod, while she continued to count down the minutes until she could be with herself.

Jessica was sent off to Slytherin and Candidus to Ravenclaw. By the time the Hat finally dispatched a Miss De Luce to Gryffindor, Fortuna had already removed her own hat and stepped forward. Flitwick insisted on calling her name out in full even though she was already sitting on the stool. The Hat barely brushed the top of her hair before bellowing "GRYFFINDOR!"

She chose a seat further down the Gryffindor table from where the other first years were sitting and stared intently at the reflection in her empty plate, looking up only to see Martin, Angelique sent off to Hufflepuff. Shortly after the Sorting concluded, the headmaster rose to greet them.

"Welcome! Welcome to another year at Hogwarts! I have a few things to say to you all, and as one of them is very serious, I think it best to get it out of the way before you become befuddled by our excellent feast. As you might be aware after their search of the Hogwarts Express, our school is presently playing host to a few of the Dementors of Azkaban, who are here on Ministry of Magic business."

Fortuna had been prepared to ignore his comments, but the mention of Dementors caught her attention.

"They are stationed at every entrance to the grounds, and while they were with us, I must make it plain that nobody is to leave school without permission. Dementors are not to be fooled by tricks or disguises—or even invisibility cloaks."

She'd have easy access to them, then. An idea began to percolate through her thoughts. The professor went on, but Fortuna considered it unimportant. His voice faded into background noise as she refined the idea with the help of her power.

Food appeared around her, more food than she had ever seen in her entire life—certainly more than she'd ever had at the Simmons household. Fortuna helped herself to the roast mutton and some of the mashed potatoes, spooning a glob onto her plate. But her mind was elsewhere as she asked her final question.

_I want to know how to deal with Dementors._

A spell. She visualized herself performing the motions and incantation that would call forth a protector capable of driving the Dementors off. Yes, her power would eventually allow her to approach the things and extricate her safely before they could do any lasting harm.

But her path dictated patience. She couldn't use the spell, not yet. It required memories. The one thing she didn't have. _Soon_, her power told her. She need only wait to create the memories required for successfully encountering the creatures again.

And she would, she swore to herself. As soon as she could, she was going to confront the Dementors and she was going to get the memories of her parents back.


	4. Chapter 4: Trouble Brewing

The matchstick on her desk morphed into a needle. Fortuna picked it up and wiggled it a bit, testing the elasticity of the metal. Then she bent it until the ends were almost touching, before letting go and watching it spring back into shape. She set it down and changed it back into a regular matchstick.

McGonagall had instructed her to experiment. Fortuna had started with color, then with shape, and had slowly started changing its physical properties. After a moment's thought, it became a needle again, only one crystalline and diamond-hard instead of rubberlike. Then it was a matchstick again.

Transfiguration was more than moving a wand and saying a few words, it was shaping something else's existence through precise understanding and sheer force of will. By this point, she could do it instantaneously, but she relished watching the change unfurl before her, savored the way the cobalt blue crept up the sides of the brittle wood and reformed it, sliver by sliver, into something slimmer, sharper, stronger.

Once she grasped the fundamentals, she stopped using her power.

Charms had nothing on this. Nothing had anything on this.

She took a few seconds to ponder whether a nice magenta might suit the needle better, give it some much-needed flair.

Professor McGonagall interrupted her speculation. "That will be enough for today. Compose a foot-long essay on the theory of Transfiguration to hand in next Tuesday. And, Miss Floris, I'd like a word."

Fortuna approached her Professor's desk as everyone else packed up and left for lunch. McGonagall waited until the room was empty before speaking. "First of all, Miss Floris, I must say the rapidity with which you have picked up Transfiguration is remarkable. I can't say that I've seen a student in all my years that has turned a match to a needle on their first attempt."

Her pleasure evaporated, leaving only self-recrimination. She should have restrained herself as she'd done in Charms and avoided succeeding so quickly and so obviously. Getting perfect scores in all her classes and doing better than her peers was one thing; completely outclassing them, being _noticed_, was another. Measures would have to be taken.

McGonagall expected a response, and Fortuna decided to use the opportunity to show her teacher that attention made her uncomfortable. "Yes, Professor," she said stiffly.

"Well, then." McGonagall took a step back and changed the subject. "I also needed to speak to you about last night. Professor Lupin said you were a bit shaken up by the Dementors on the train. I would like you to go see Madam Pomfrey in the hospital wing to make sure there aren't any lingering effects."

The way she said that indicated that she wouldn't _like_ her to do it, she would _make_ her do it. More attention.

Somehow McGonagall managed to sense resistance in her hesitation. "Miss Floris, this is not something to be taken lightly. I will not see a student under my watch neglect their own welfare. You have Potions with Professor Snape after lunch?"

"Yes, Professor."

"Good, you will speak to her when you're finished."

The steps to arguing McGonagall out of sending her to Madam Pomfrey or executing an elaborate plot to fake a visit demanded far more time than she was willing to put in. "Yes, Professor."

"Thank you," McGonagall said, and Fortuna took it as a dismissal.

But, as she was halfway through the door, McGonagall spoke again. "And, Miss Floris?"

"Yes, Professor?"

"I would advise you that your potions knife is to be used _only_ during lesson time. I don't want to hear about you nicking yourself in the hallways because you decided to carry it around with you for whatever reason."

"Yes, Professor."

As she walked to lunch, Fortuna asked herself how anyone had learned about the knife. McGonagall had heard it from Flitwick at breakfast, who'd learned it from a Ravenclaw prefect the night before, who'd heard it from Candidus, who'd been regaling the Ravenclaw common room with commentary on her behavior on the train, complete with elaborate speculation about her issues.

She'd have to deal with him.

She thought about her problem as she ate her cucumber sandwiches, which she'd selected because she thought it was what an Enid Blyton character would have eaten in her situation, at least in the absence of treacle pudding. They were supposed to help soothe the soul, but Fortuna didn't feel any difference.

Her first day wasn't over, but she'd already been noticed by three professors, become a topic of rumors, and done something that even a prodigy wouldn't have been able to do. If she continued like this, everyone would know about her powers before the weekend, which was unacceptable.

Yet she found herself reluctant to sabotage herself in Transfiguration and knew from experience at Muggle school that feigning incompetence in other subjects would eventually become tiresome. That was equally unacceptable.

If she didn't want to stick out by being so much better than everyone else, could she make everyone else better?

Yes. It would take some time, but Fortuna could make her year the most academically distinguished in the history of Hogwarts _and_ ensure the others' success couldn't be traced back to her.

And she'd handle the fallout from the Dementors today. The Gryffindors and Ravenclaws had double potions together twice a week, so she left the Great Hall at precisely the correct time to intercept Candidus on his way to the dungeons.

Once he realized he couldn't avoid her as they were going to the same place, he smiled and tried to make small talk. "How are you feeling?"

"Quite well," she said. "Considering that I must have suffered something awful from the tragic loss of my parents and being abused in the Muggle foster system. Being sorted into Gryffindor didn't do me any favors either—although where else could I have gone? I'm clearly not clever enough for Ravenclaw, and Slytherin would gobble a Muggleborn like me up. There's always Hufflepuff, but I'm a bit of a loner and far too touchy. Unstable, you know."

As she spoke, Candidus looked confused and then horrified, going white as he realized she was repeating the words he'd spoken last night in his common room. She exaggerated his cadence and inflection just enough for him to recognize his voice in hers and feel mocked. He stumbled through a mixture of apologies and justifications, but Fortuna cut him off.

"You were unkind," she said. "You heard some older students talking about Harry Potter fainting because of the Dementors and thought you could contribute to the conversation and get some cred with your housemates if you told them about me, so you decided to be unkind."

"I—"

"They all thought you were a git." Fortuna gave him a sidelong glance. "That doesn't mean the gossip won't stick to me."

She pushed the door to their potions classroom open before he could reply and headed to a spot in the far corner in accordance with her power's recommendations. As she set her workstation up, she saw some of the Ravenclaws point in her direction out of the corner of her eye. Candidus would notice them, too, and squirm.

She deliberately met his eye as she placed her potions knife (not the one in her pocket, which she was carrying and would continue to carry despite McGonagall's admonishment) down on the cutting board. He flushed and looked away.

A Gryffindor girl with brown hair pulled back into two pigtails sat down next to her without asking. "Fortuna! How was lunch? I didn't see you after Transfiguration."

Fortuna didn't recognize her in the slightest, but she could deduce from the house tie and familiarity that one of her roommates had caught up with her. Her power filled in the blanks for her: this was Flavia de Luce, she had seen everything Fortuna had done in Transfiguration and she was fishing for information about why McGonagall had held her back after class. There was nothing malicious in Flavia's curiosity; she assumed McGonagall had held her back for praise and wanted to know if she'd offered Fortuna additional study opportunities.

"I got to the Great Hall a little late," Fortuna said. "Professor McGonagall wanted to see how I was settling in."

Whatever reply Flavia had been planning on making was cut off by Professor Snape's entrance. He swept in from the backroom and circled the classroom, looming and sneering and monologuing before finally directing them to brew a Forgetfulness Potion, which he expected to be perfect.

"I am quite fond of Potions," Flavia announced, hauling her copy of their textbook out of her bag. She flipped it open to the relevant page. Despite the book being new, its pages were already filled with annotations. "One of my ancestors was enamored with them set up a private lab in one of the wings of our house. It's where I live when I'm at home."

"I'll prepare the ingredients if you prepare the potion itself," Fortuna offered, knowing it was what Flavia wanted to hear.

"Excellent!" Flavia was already starting a small fire beneath the cauldron. "A low flame will keep the potion at a simmer. If it outright boils, the drops from the River Lethe will experience rapid decomposition and the resulting anions will start reacting with each other. And then the cauldron will probably explode and we'll wake up in the hospital wing with no memory of how we got there."

Fortuna diced Valerian sprigs, her hands moving under the direction of her power.

"Would you hand me my thermometer?" Flavia asked, extending a hand without looking up. "I want to measure the temperature."

Fortuna handed it to her and the girl affixed the tube of mercury in place. She poured in the water and watched as the red liquid began to tick up and up, before finally leveling out at two hundred and fifty degrees. Fortuna held out a pipette without being prompted, and Flavia added two drops of water from the River Lethe.

"It's always surprised me that such a valuable mythological find is used by children learning how to make potions," Flavia remarked. "I'm sure the ancient Greeks would have something rude to say about this."

Fortuna didn't know anything about mythology, but she knew what Flavia was feeling—from experience, for once, and not her power. This girl felt about Potions the way she felt about Transfiguration.

Flavia collected a handful of the neatly diced sprig and waited, patiently counting down the seconds on the fingers of her other hand. Satisfied, she sprinkled it in, slowly letting it fall from her fingers into the bubbling liquid. Then she stirred the brew with long, rhythmic strokes before waving her wand and settling down on her stool.

"That's everything for now," Flavia pronounced, marking the time in her book. "All it needs now is a while to simmer, and then we can add the berries."

Fortuna nodded. She'd crush the berries with enough time to spare.

Flavia dove into her bag and resurfaced with an hourglass. "This was my great uncle Tarquin's," she informed Fortuna. "It can count down any time you want it to, not just an hour."

Snape came over to glare at their cauldron but caught the calculated flicker of Fortuna's eyes. He whirled around and saw Candidus crushing sprigs. Fortuna and Flavia forgotten, the professor descended upon him. "Does the word _diced_ imply the use of a mortar and pestle to you, boy?"

Fortuna sat with her hands in her lap, while Flavia pored over the textbook. She pulled a notebook out from underneath it and began writing down everything they had done with exact comments, from the way the samples were prepared down to the direction she had stirred their potion.

"I like to keep track," Flavia said, responding to the unasked question. "It ensures that future batches go smoother, and helps me to replicate the effects of a particularly good sample."

Fortuna watched purple bubbles rise from the cauldron and float a few inches into the air before they popped. Flavia had worked at the potion with a familiarity that spoke of experience. Heavy experience, laws against underage magic aside, if the pages of potion-making that filled her notebook had anything to say about it.

Fortuna took a chance. "You seem to know a fair bit about potions. Do you know if there are any that do the opposite of this? That can make people remember things?"

"Yes, there are potions that can help people remember facts more easily, but they're considered cheating if you take them before an exam."

"What about something longer term?"

"You mean like a potion to undo an Obliviation?"

Fortuna hesitated._ I want to know if I have an Obliviation on me._

Fog.

"Yes," she said.

"No, unfortunately. Healers haven't found a way to do anything like that." Flavia paused, then smiled, fully revealing teeth encased in braces. "Yet."

"Do you know if there are any potions that can turn people into monsters?"

Flavia thought about it. "My father would say alcohol, but no. Not intentionally, at least. Poorly done potions have been known to cause a variety of unintended side-effects, but not a complete transformation. They're generally reversible, too."

"I see."

Flavia stopped writing. She studied Fortuna's face, her eyes intense and searching. She whispered her next words conspiratorially. "It would take very powerful dark magic to change someone into a monster. If you intend to do it, you have to promise that you'll let me watch."

"I'm not going to do it," Fortuna said truthfully. She would never do anything that could lead to someone else experiencing what she had. "I was just curious."

"Well, if you _were_ going to do it, I'd be duty-bound as your potions partner and housemate to tell you there are much simpler ways to get rid of someone. Some of the strongest poisons on earth can be created with a few simple steps. Not even a potion—Muggle science can be just as effective, if not more. Have you ever done chemistry?"

Fortuna confessed she had only gotten a superficial introduction to the subject in her sixth-year science class, and Flavia's mouth twisted in something like pity. Then she launched into tales of the hours she'd passed synthesizing and extracting chemical compositions in the nearly abandoned wing of her family's home, often to give her an edge in the ongoing war with her sisters. She described the tiny vials she used to keep track of her different solutions, solvents, and suspensions. She spoke at length about igniting flames with water, cough syrup, and a little crystal called Potassium Permanganate. She shared the time she'd gotten distracted reading one of her books, and had left a beaker idling on the burner for so long that it blew up in her hand the instant she added water.

By the time the sand had fully drained from the hourglass, forty minutes had elapsed and it was nearly time to take the cauldron off the fire. Fortuna reached for the mortar and pestle to crush berries while Flavia hovered over their creation, standard ingredient in hand.

She dropped the powder in and took the pestle from Fortuna, examining the powdered berries. "You drained the liquid," she remarked. "Well done. It's a deliciously effective poison, but it would have melted the cauldron."

After adding two pinches of the berries, Flavia started stirring again, gentle as a nursemaid, swirling the ingredients together. She drew her wand, waved it, and declared their work complete. She filled a vial of the orange solution out and stoppered it, waiting for inspection. Then, when she thought Fortuna was so busy cleaning their tools and clearing their workstation that she wouldn't see her, she took a few more samples and stashed them in her pockets.

As the class reached its end, Snape went around belittling his students' efforts, vanishing poor attempts and turning his rather large nose up at the not-so-poor attempts. He finally reached Fortuna's bench.

"Acceptable," he said, in a tone that implied it was not. "The single acceptable vial here, which only speaks poorly to the abilities of this year's crop of Ravenclaws. I want a twelve inch summary on the uses of this potion and the ways in which it can fail."

He looked over the class, his eye lingering on some more than others. "Some of you should be experts on that already."

With that, he vanished into his office and their classmates fled.

Flavia had a more positive view on their work than their professor. "Don't worry about what Snape said. Feely and Daffy—my sisters, you know—have told me he never says anything nice. An 'acceptable' from him would normally be grounds for getting a branch of study named after you."

Fortuna had already known Snape would never say a kind word to either of them but packed up her books instead of saying so.

Flavia was dancing around, hugging herself. "You were brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I've never managed to get the berries crushed so evenly, and the sprigs! Most people overreact and chop them too finely, but it's a _dice_, not a _brunoise_. You make such a good assistant."

Fortuna accepted this enthusiastic praise as being commensurate with Snape's faint praise, but Flavia suddenly stopped dancing and a look of horror crossed her face. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean assistant as in you weren't important. I just—"

"I understood you," Fortuna said, "and I'm honored to be your assistant, Flavia de Luce." The words were chosen by her power, but she found her heart was in them.

Flavia's discomfort eased noticeably, and her smile returned. "Yaroo," she said quietly. "Do you want to go to the library? We could maybe work on our Transfiguration homework . . ."

"Yes," Fortuna said, "I'll meet you there, but I'm going to the hospital wing first."

"Are you! Well, I can help you find it."

"It's alright. I know where it is."

"I'd still like to come."

"You don't have to."

"Oh, pish-posh," Flavia said, already leading the way. "Don't worry, this isn't an inconvenience."

Fortuna found her classmate's insistence on accompanying her suspicious and asked herself about it. Her power told her that Flavia intended to use the guise of a worried friend as cover to steal several medical potions and ingredients for personal use. She decided to allow it; she didn't want to go to the doctor to begin with, nor did she look forward to having to answer any questions about her experience. Some compensation was in order.

The hospital wing was less a wing and more a rather large room. Two columns of beds lined the walls, creating an aisle that led to a small office at the far end. Most of the beds were empty, but one or two had the privacy sheets pulled around them.

Madam Pomfrey was a plump middle-aged witch who fell upon them the moment they entered. "Can I help you two with something?"

Fortuna nodded, hands clasped behind her back. "Yes, ma'am. Professor McGonagall said you wanted to speak with me."

"Ah, the girl from the train," Madam Pomfrey said darkly. "You aren't the first student affected by the Dementors and I'm sure you won't be the last. Can't imagine what the Ministry was thinking when they brought those things here."

"Is she going to need any potions, ma'am?" Flavia asked. "Maybe an injection?"

"An injection!" Madam Pomfrey exclaimed, turning to Flavia. While her back was turned, Fortuna rolled up her robe sleeve, lifted her sweater sleeve to her nose, and inhaled deeply. Harbinger had slept on her sweater the night before, leaving his dander all over it, and she'd need to produce a sneeze in order to prevent Flavia from getting caught. "Wherever did you get the idea? No, of course not. I just need to ask Miss…?"

"Floris, ma'am."

"I just need to ask Miss Floris some questions. Come along, now."

Fortuna obediently sat down on one of the beds nearer to the office and Madam Pomfrey pulled up a chair; Flavia maneuvered herself into her blind spot. "First things first," she said, drawing her wand so she could perform diagnostic spells. "How are you feeling physically? Aches, pains, discomfort?"

Fortuna kept her eyes trained on Madam Pomfrey, subtly encouraging the nurse to maintain eye contact as Flavia crept into the back room. She knew that if she didn't draw this out, Flavia was going to take too long to get away with it. If Pomfrey thought Fortuna was fine, she'd push her out the door with a pat on the back and some chocolate in hand, like a clinically inclined Willy Wonka.

"No, ma'am," Fortuna said. She leaned forward, causing Madam Pomfrey to mirror her. "I'm feeling better, but..."

"But?"

Flavia had pried the cabinets open and was picking her way through the racks.

"I'm not sure, ma'am." Fortuna drew out the words, taking deep breaths and long pained pauses like she was psyching herself up to disclose a painful secret. "I thought it was a nightmare or a hallucination, but Professor Lupin told me Dementors can make you see things from your past...?"

Madam Pomfrey nodded along, "Yes, they can force you to relive your worst days. If you spend enough time around them, that's all you're left with."

Fortuna let her gaze slip away from Madam Pomfrey's face, directing it towards the entrance. "I saw my parents die."

Madam Pomfrey's face grew stony. "This is what I told them would happen. Several of the children here lost family members during the War, and yet Minister Fudge pushed it through. I'm sorry, Miss Floris."

Fortuna picked at the sheet she was sitting on with one of her hands. The sneeze was building.

"If they cause you any more grief, then let me know. We can see about getting you some potions to help with sleep. Maybe if you were to talk to—"

A vial slipped out of Flavia's hands. It wouldn't shatter, but the sound of the glass striking stone would ring louder than any bell. Fortuna reared her head back and unleashed the sneeze, which nearly shook her off the bed.

"Oh Merlin," Madam Pomfrey said. "I thought you said you were feeling well?"

"I'm sorry, ma'am," Fortuna said. She wiped at her nose and sneezed again. "I caught a cold last week."

Madam Pomfrey shook her head and waved her wand around Fortuna's head. "It's not a cold," she said. "You're allergic to cats. Severely."

Fortuna nearly shot off the bed. "I'm not going to give my cat up," she exclaimed. "I can't, I just got him and he's only a kitten. It wouldn't be right and you can't make me."

The nurse raised a hand in placation, and Fortuna settled back down. "There's no need for anything so extreme," she said soothingly. "We have a charm for this situation. It's a fifth-year spell, so you'll just have to ask an older student to recast it once a day. _Pestem alligo_!"

The incident with the dropped vial had spurred Flavia into speeding up, and she was hastily rifling the remaining shelves to get what she wanted.

"I'm sorry, what were we talking about before?" Madam Pomfrey asked.

"What to do if I see a Dementor."

"Yes, well, you had best not be seeing any more of them, but, if you do, try to stay calm and get away. They're only here to look for Sirius Black and ought to ignore you. Just speak to your head of house if you have any more questions. I'll tell Professor McGonagall that you're fine."

Flavia reemerged, still in Madam Pomfrey's blindspot.

"Thank you, ma'am."

Madam Pomfrey pushed her chair back and collided with Flavia. "Oh my, I'm sorry! I forgot you were there."

Flavia waved it off as an accident and Madam Pomfrey sent them on their way with a chocolate frog and an admonition to avoid the Dementors.

"So," Fortuna said once they were halfway to the library, "Did you get anything good?"

"Get anything good from where?" Flavia played it off well for the most part, but the red rising up her neck gave away her nervousness.

"I distracted Madam Pomfrey for you," Fortuna said. "At least tell me if you nabbed anything worth the risk."

Flavia's pride was clearly injured, and Fortuna let her sulk it off. After a few minutes, her classmate's scowl morphed into a grin. "Your parents must have been fishermen in the Arctic. No one else could keep their cool like that."

_Must have been_. Flavia had heard what she'd told Madam Pomfrey.

"I wouldn't have guessed you were putting her on if you hadn't told me. Your sneeze was so perfectly timed."

"I ran out of things to talk about."

Flavia looked around the hallway, making sure it was empty before she pulled open her bag and revealed a small but impressive assortment of tinctures and herbs stashed in her cauldron. She rattled off their names and Fortuna's power explained to her what each did.

"How did you know what I was doing?" she asked, sealing her bag. "I was sure I had you both fooled."

"You thought I wouldn't notice you sneak off?"

Flavia digested this. "You are a very interesting person, Fortuna," she said at last. Then she seemed to come to a decision and surged forward, hurrying towards the library with renewed motivation. "There were a lot of things I had been planning to do myself, but it's always better to have company."

Behind her, Fortuna smiled.


	5. Chapter 5: Lead, Follow, Get Out the Way

The Hogwarts library was a massive maze of wood and parchment. Bookshelves were packed so tightly from floor to ceiling that students could barely pass each other in an aisle. The only space free of them was a wide path that curved around the room, and it was here that students could take up residence in a stuffed leather armchair or around a table or an individual study nook away from the prying eyes of the librarian.

The two of them had demarcated one end of a table with a wall of books and hunkered down behind it. This was largely for aesthetic purposes, Flavia said, reasoning that it was best to do your thinking surrounded by the thoughts of others. Fortuna was skeptical, but the chairs were soft enough to fall asleep in and the comforting smell of books hung thick in the air. She wouldn't object.

Flavia's promise to bring Fortuna in on her scheming had quickly broken down into complaints about not having a proper place to think things out properly. "This will do for now, but I wish I had my lab here. It's where I do my best thinking, and it's impossible to refine one's nefarious stratagems in a less than intimate space."

Fortuna's hand wrote out her essay for Potions even as she paid rapt attention to the young chemist. She had calculated this carefully: if the essay were too perfect, Snape would accuse her of copying off of Flavia, but if it were too imperfect, he would give her an Acceptable instead of an Exceeds Expectations. She settled for keeping all the information correct, but sprinkled the essay with particularly egregious spelling errors that would give him the excuse necessary to stop her from getting an Outstanding, a grade he reserved for Slytherins (she could already foresee that Flavia would explode next Thursday).

"We can work over the first steps and find someplace better to work out the greater details. There isn't even a place for me to brew potions! At least, not one that we won't be interrupted in. If Feely finds us in a classroom, she'll ruin everything and take fifteen points off Gryffindor just to spite me. We'll have to find somewhere private to set up."

"Set up for what?" Fortuna asked her.

"Right, sorry, I haven't gotten into the meat of it yet. You see, I'm planning to—"

"Fortuna, excuse me, could I have a moment of your time?"

Flavia scowled and Fortuna swiveled her chair around to face Candidus. The boy stood a little too far away and was holding his book bag protectively in front of him.

"Could we speak alone?" he asked.

"No," Fortuna replied, "we couldn't."

Candidus dithered, weighing whether it was better to let the problem fester and try again later or defuse the tension now but accept further humiliation in front of Flavia. He took a deep breath to steady himself. "I wanted to apologize for my actions. It wasn't befitting someone of my station to speak like that, and I'm sorry if you were offended."

Fortuna nodded. "It's a start. I accept that you know what you did was wrong."

"Well, that's good then," Candidus said, unsure how to end the conversation.

"Oi," someone called from somewhere off in the bookstacks. Jessica strutted up with Angelique following behind her like a lost puppy. "Thought I heard you slags mouthing off in here."

"Hi Fortuna. Hi Candidus," Angelique said with a wave.

"Just got through with planting and this bird needed a meet with her mates. Figured you boffins would be camped out in here like flies on a pile."

Jessica pulled up a seat and slid Fortuna's stack of books to one side to get a better look at her. Angelique grabbed a seat next to her and Candius, after shooting a longing glance at the library entrance, took a chair himself. He sat opposite Jessica but didn't move Flavia's books, ensuring that he didn't have to look directly at Fortuna.

Flavia did not look happy.

"Sorry for interrupting," Angelique said, "but what were you two talking about?"

Candidus tried to brush it off. "Oh, it was nothing really, just—just—"

"Are you two enjoying your houses?" Fortuna asked, preventing Candidus from choking on his feet.

Angelique nodded like her neck had turned to jelly, while Jessica leaned back and propped her feet up on the table. "Yeah, they're alright. The third years are such bloody gits. Bunch of knob-heads and arsemongers. That lot is dead from the neck up, but the rest of the snakes are choice."

Candidus found common ground here and pounced on it. "I know what you mean. My housemates are mostly well and good, but there is this girl the year above me who is a complete loon. She—" He trailed off, doubtlessly remembering the conversation outside the Potions classroom. He finished with a lame, "Yeah, they're alright."

"And who are you? I'm sorry we got in the way, we just wanted to say hi," Angelique asked, gesturing towards Flavia.

"I'm Flavia de Luce," she said and offered nothing else.

"De Luce? Like, Ophelia de Luce? The bloody Head Girl?" Jessica asked.

"Yes," Flavia said, shortly. "My eldest sister."

"She took us to our dorms and laid into us like a bobby last night. Fat lot of good though, that feast had half of us done out like deadmen before we even hit the bed," she said with an odd sense of pride.

"Yes, that does sound like her. Feely likes to think she's an inspirational figure to all and sundry."

Candidus opened his mouth.

"And yes, Daphne's in Ravenclaw, though I'm surprised she showed herself long enough for you to notice. She's always surrounded by books, barely remembers to come out to feed." Flavia stretched, apparently oblivious to the fact _she_ was surrounded by books. "_I_ think she's an inferius, bent on consuming the brains of the already dead."

"Speaking of brains," Jessica said, and turned to Fortuna, "you going to explain how you got to know your onions in Transfig?"

Flavia suddenly started paying attention—though she was trying to pretend she had started working on her paper—and Angelique and Candidus dialed in on Jessica's words, both interested in knowing what she was talking about.

"The key is to turn something into something else," Fortuna replied.

"Thanks, you git, now are you gonna explain or will I be wrestling it out of you?" she asked, already standing up to get her in a chokehold.

"What do you mean? Did Tuna do well in class today?" Angelique asked.

Fortuna felt the back of her neck heat up like an oil fire. "My name is Fortuna, nothing else. If you don't like it, call me Floris."

Angelique smiled indulgently, like she'd just been growled at by a dachshund puppy.

Jessica, still standing up, pointed at Fortuna. "The girl was going in on that matchstick like an arsonist. Had the bloody thing change on her first try. She had more needles than a porcupine, mate. Even the professor looked spooked by it."

She didn't need Jessica overblowing the whole thing like this and risking people asking the wrong kind of questions, such as "should a first-year be that good at magic?" or "how _exactly_ did you know how to do that?"

"I didn't have much to do this summer besides read my books, while lying around my house," Fortuna told them. "Some of the books go into great detail on how a spell works and what to do. Charms was a good introduction, but Transfiguration was where it all clicked together."

A lie was always better with a helping of truth ladled over it. They bought it, or at least bought it enough to not push any farther. Jessica had her doubts but was more concerned with getting help, while Flavia was curious, but wouldn't press around so many people.

She was actually quite peeved at the moment and it took another use of her power for Fortuna to realize she was upset that she hadn't gotten to express all her plans for the school year and wouldn't get to until everyone left. Still, she finally moved her books aside so she could get a proper look,

"Ugh, are you saying magic is all based in your head?" Angelique asked, tapping hers.

Candidus smirked. "That _would_ explain why you're having difficulties."

Fortuna kicked him in the ankle.

He looked off to the side meekly. Message received.

Fortuna recalled the plan she'd considered at lunchtime. She had a student from each house, here, each of whom had their own strengths. They could form the nexus of her study group. "Have you tried visualization?" she asked.

"Well… no," Angelique said, not knowing what 'visualization' meant. "I mean, I just try to turn something into something else?"

Fortuna didn't have a matchstick, but she did have a quill. She put it in the middle of the table, checked with her power to make sure this wouldn't get back to a teacher, and pulled out her wand. Using her power to make the transformation from quill to knitting needle take place in extremely slow motion, Fortuna spoke.

"It's not getting the final result, it's about the process. You need to see the object moving from quill to needle, or matchstick to pin. You need to understand _how_ it is changing, not just that it changes. The best way to do that is to picture it in your head."

"Huh," Jessica said, leaning back in her chair after the quick demonstration. Then she took out one of her own quills and tried; the end result was both feathery and pointy, but she was evidently satisfied. As the other three students followed suit, Fortuna casually said something about how sometimes it only took a little bit of work outside of class.

It clicked.

"I know!" Angelique said. "We should form a study group! We could work together, teach each other and help each other practice. I'm sure there's a few older students who might be willing to help, for some bribes. Candy usually works, right?"

Jessica was enthusiastic, Candidus (more open to the idea after having been berated by Snape) was thoughtful, Flavia said nothing, and Fortuna confirmed that she'd be willing to contribute Transfiguration expertise. Her power told her that Angelique, the only one of them with any sort of social ability, would start asking older students tonight if any would be willing to help them with studying. A fourth year Hufflepuff would be kind enough to take them up on their questions in exchange for a few chocolate frogs, and things would begin to pick up steam.

"Well, perfect," Jessica decided, "Then for now, Miss Visualization can help us out with our essays."

* * *

It was late at night when Flavia threw back the curtain Fortuna had drawn around her bed to shield herself from the prying eyes and questions of her other roommates. Harbinger, who was nestled in between Fortuna's knees, startled and tried to leap away. Flavia intercepted, gathering him into her arms as she sat, and applied head scritches until he settled down in her lap to purr himself to sleep.

"I'm going to find Sirius Black," she said, not in a whisper but softly enough her voice wouldn't carry her words to the other girls. "He was a traitor during the War. He's going to finish off Harry Potter for the enemy if we don't stop him."

Fortuna let _Monk's Hood_ fall to her chest while she pondered this. It was difficult to imagine that Sirius Black was walking around Hogwarts right now, considering term had started and the castle was full of students and surrounded by Dementors. Dementors that would stay in place as long as he was at large. Dementors that she could use to pry the secrets to her past from her mind, given enough time.

Flavia shifted to an appeal to emotion. She pointed at the small bedside bookshelf Fortuna had filled with her Muggle books. "Sayers, Crispin, Christie, Peters. You checked six books out from the library today and four of them were murder mysteries."

She nodded, still considering. She'd heard Black's name mentioned on the train and she'd heard Harry Potter's name from her own mouth when she'd reprimanded Candidus. Black had glanced off her attention, but Harry Potter had been upset by the Dementors, too. She'd asked after him and learned from her power he was also an orphan who had witnessed his parents' death.

A death, Flavia had just told her, that Sirius Black had engineered.

Fortuna hesitated, suspended between equally compelling options, and listened to her friend.

Flavia spoke every word with complete self-assurance, almost as though she were the one with the one with the power to do everything. "What do you like about them? The puzzle, seeing all the pieces come together? Or the justice, using truth to turn a wrong right? Either way, this is your chance. Solve a mystery where others have failed, right a wrong."

Fortuna found herself drawn in. She could picture the two of them solving the mystery of where was Sirius Black and stopping him before he killed Harry Potter. Just one question and—

No. She stopped herself. When had she ever allowed herself to skip a mystery, to rush to the end and speed through the search that made it worth doing? What was the point of joining with Flavia to solve a mystery if she went and did the entire thing by herself in the space of a thought?

Instead, she'd just do a quick check to make sure they'd stay safe even without her power's guidance. Would they be hurt or killed if they looked for him? Would Black get to Harry Potter first?

_No._

Fortuna stuck her hand out for Flavia to shake. As Flavia leaned forward to take it, she scrunched Harbinger between her belly and calf, eliciting a disapproving yowl.

"Oh, will you two just shut up!" one of their roommates shouted from her bed across the room. "Are you going to go at this all night or just until I call a professor?"

The two of them beat a hasty retreat from the hostile atmosphere of the first year girls' room, leaving Harbinger to sulk and Romilda Vane to sleep, and regrouped on a couch in the common room. There were a few groups of older students lounging by the fire, mostly chatting and playing games, and one girl studying by herself in the corner.

"We'll start first thing in the morning," Flavia announced, clasping her hands together. "But we're going to need a place to hold our meetings and run tests. _Plotting_ is best done by candlelight beneath a full moon, but actually _thinking_ requires a space of its own."

Fortuna decided to form a path forward before Flavia got back into how much she wished she had her lab.

_I want to know the best place to go to build a base in our quest to find Sirius Black._

Her power told her to go to the Shrieking Shack. It took four more questions to figure out what that was, where that was, how to get there, and how to craft a suitable explanation for how she knew about it.

"I heard the Weasley twins mention a place at breakfast this morning," she whispered to Flavia. "A place away from everyone else. They were talking about ways to sneak into Hogsmeade past the Dementors, and they've found two secret passages Filch doesn't know about. One of them leads from the castle to a candy store, but one of them leads to an abandoned house from underneath that tree that attacks everyone who goes by it."

Flavia looked outraged. "You knew there were _secret passages_ and you _didn't tell me_?"

"I didn't have time to let you know," Fortuna said with appropriate contrition. "Sorry."

"I should have known they'd have already found all the secret passages," Flavia said. Her eyes drifted over to two red-haired boys Fortuna hadn't ever seen. "They get into all sorts of trouble and some of the things Feely says they've done could _not_ be done without a good way of sneaking around."

She sounded jealous, and she watched the boys, presumably the Weasley twins, laughing by the fire for a few contemplative moments.

"Well," she said, "Did they mention a way to get past the tree?"

"There's a knot you can hit with a long stick. I don't know which knot, but . . ."

"There have to be a limited number of knots. We can deduce which one it is by hitting them one at a time until we find one that works! Right, let's get going then."

Fortuna frowned. "This late? It's almost curfew."

"What better time than now?" Flavia asked. "We can get there and back before anyone notices. And I'll make sure nobody notices we're going."

She drew her wand and surreptitiously pointed it at the girl in the corner. With a swish, flick, and a whispered _wingardium leviosa_, the girl's book pile collapsed onto the floor. Everyone turned to look to see what caused the noise, and Flavia grabbed Fortuna's arm and hauled her out through the portrait while the other students were distracted.

Flavia started out ahead, but Fortuna prodded and hinted until she was leading the way through the rest of the castle. They scurried down staircases and along hallways, hid from a poltergeist behind a suit of armor, and snuck into a classroom by the main entrance. They waited a few moments for the caretaker to pass by before scuttling out of the castle.

The lawn was brilliantly illuminated by a full moon, and they made their way across the field to the massive tree that stood alone without difficulty. The tree was less cooperative than the light; it snapped the first three of their sticks, and the next three as well.

"We have to get closer," Flavia said.

Fortuna held up a hand to get her to hold back —no easy task —and dove forward. She dodged the tree's massive limbs as they smashed into the earth where she'd stood a few moments before, darted around them as they snapped out to intercept her, and finally slid to a halt at the base of the tree, where her hand reached out and poked a root. The tree calmed down and Flavia hurried to follow her.

"What _was_ that? Have you thought about being a Chaser?"

"We're already chasing a criminal," Fortuna replied, and crawled into a hole that was almost impossible to see, buried amongst the tree's roots.

Flavia slid down behind her. "_Lumos_," she said, and the light at the end of her wand revealed a cramped, narrow dirt passageway. The ceiling was so low that, even at their height, they were forced to crouch the entire way to Hogsmeade.

"It isn't the easiest place to get to," Flavia proclaimed, once they'd resurfaced in a dilapidated house, "but that just means we won't have anyone finding us."

Fortuna surveyed her surroundings. Paint was peeling off the walls, every piece of furniture in the room had been broken apart, and a layer of dust coated most everything. In a word, the place was a dump.

"This is perfect," Flavia declared. "We'll need to clean everything up and fix a few things, but it's _perfect_. Oh, if only Dogger were here, he could help. But I think with the both of us it shouldn't take too long."

Fortuna silently let her power figure out the best way to fix up the place. They would have to transfigure the furniture, commandeer supplies from the Hogwarts dungeons, use some spells to get the dust off, raid the kitchens for ample food, and—

Flavia's head snapped around. "What—"

Activating her power on instinct, Fortuna thrust herself in front of Flavia before she realized she'd done it, and her wand was up, brandished in front of her.

"Is that?"

Something was stirring in the shadows. Something that Flavia's keen hearing had picked up while Fortuna had been preoccupied by her own thoughts. The shape expanded, and its eyes glittered in the meager light of Flavia's wand as it rose to its full height.

A large, shaggy black dog stepped forward.


	6. Chapter 6: Grand Theft Alchemy

The dog slowly advanced, its eyes flicking between the two of them. The light from Flavia's wand glinted off its jagged white teeth, and its entire body was tense, like it had been hooked up to a battery and was waiting for the shock.

There was no cover in the shack. Anything that may have once been useful had been smashed to splinters or torn to shreds long ago. There were no places to hide and the exit was slightly too far away to reach before the dog could get to them. Their best chance was to fight it.

It stopped inches from Fortuna's wandtip.

"Flavia, I want you to run," Fortuna told her in a calm whisper. "I'll distract it, get out and get help."

"Absolutely not," Flavia said, standing still as a statue under the dog's gaze.

The dog slowly lowered itself to the floor and rested its head on its paws. The meaning was universal: not a threat. Capitulation.

Flavia handed her wand to Fortuna and knelt, heedless of the potential danger, the dog's dirtied state, and—were those fleas? She cast _Lumos _herself. Yes, those were fleas. And Flavia was sinking her fingers into the dog's mangy coat so she could rake its back.

"He seems to be intelligent." Flavia was confident in her assessment although all it had done was accept her ministrations. "He must have been a wizard's dog. Not a guard dog, unless they picked him off his size without getting to know him. In any event, he wasn't left here to guard _this _place. It's been forgotten for a while."

"It probably dug its way in," Fortuna said, knowing it had. "We'll have to block up the hole."

"With him inside," Flavia said decisively. "We may have someone to help keep our lair safe now."

The dog whined.

"Yes, of course we'll feed you. Do you think we have time to get food now?"

Fortuna thought about it. The kitchens were still open, preparing breakfast and parts of lunch for the next day, but they were on the far side of the castle. It would take the better part of four hours to trek there, collect the food, bring it back here, and sneak into the castle again. It was already edging towards one in the morning, they had class tomorrow at ten, and Fortuna wanted to make breakfast this time.

"Not tonight," she said. "We can come back tomorrow with food for it and supplies for us."

"Don't call him _it_."

"What should it be called, then?"

Flavia paced for a while, then snapped her fingers. She grabbed a chair leg which had been broken off what must have once been once an incredibly fancy seat, lifted her staff, and gently set it on the dog's head. "I crown you... King George the Fluff."

Fortuna shuddered. "I won't allow you to name anyone that."

"Why?" Flavia looked hurt. "What's wrong with it? King George is a respectable figure!"

"Why _the Fluff_?"

"_The Fifth _is already taken."

"We can't call him something so twee. He needs a dignified name, like Alexander."

"How is Alexander more dignified than King George the Fluff?"

"Alexander is the name of a conqueror. Something proud, something to aspire to. Fluff is just ridiculous."

"Why don't we let him choose?" Flavia asked. She stood up, collected her wand from Fortuna, and walked over to the other side of the room. "Let's both call him. See who he goes to. My liege, King George the Fluff, will you grace me with your presence?"

"Alexander," Fortuna said authoritatively. "Stay here."

The dog _looked _at her and, after a moment, pushed himself to his feet, turned his back on her, and slouched over to Flavia. "I'm glad to see we are in agreement, Your Majesty," she said smugly, scratching between his ears.

Fortuna gave up; it didn't matter _what _the dog was called, or that it preferred Flavia. Harbinger had the advantages of felininity, class, sobriety, and cleanliness.

Flavia was already talking about illumination strategies. Candles, jars of portable fire (once she learned how to make them), torches, lanterns, lamps hooked up to a portable generator (which she believed she could build, with the right tools, though petrol was another concern), and anything else that didn't need constant holding.

"We'll need blackout curtains to make sure we can't be seen," Fortuna said. "We can get spare bed curtains from our dorm, transfigure them a little."

"You mean _you _can transfigure them a little," Flavia said. "_I _can stand by and cheer you on. Do you know _reparo_?"

Fortuna shook her head. "You can show me tomorrow."

As they explored the house—aside from its dilapidated state, it wasn't really a shack—they each took note of what they had to work with and what they wanted to bring. Fortuna paid more attention to the surroundings and possible security risks, while Flavia expounded on her desire for potions equipment. She seemed adamant they wouldn't be able to do half as much without it. The books, the furniture, the carpet—everything else was secondary.

"Do you know much about Sirius Black?"

"No. How do you feel about using this room for your potions lab?" Fortuna asked as they reached the second storey landing.

Flavia nodded, and continued, "Father isn't keen on speaking of his time in the war, but he did make sure to warn us before he sent Feely, Daffy, and me off to Hogwarts. 'He's a dangerous man, don't do anything stupid.' He was really speaking to me, and those two made sure I knew it."

"Why is he dangerous?"

"What have you heard about the War?"

"Mostly that it happened."

"There are wizards who don't think we should allow anyone from a Muggle family to go to Hogwarts or participate in our society. About twenty years ago, they rallied around You-Know-Who—a Dark Wizard—and tried to take over. He disappeared after he attacked the Potters, but some of his servants stayed."

"Including Sirius Black," said Fortuna, who did not know who You-Know-Who was.

"Yes," Flavia said, throwing open the door to what might charitably be called a bedroom. Alexander nudged past her and jumped up on the tattered bed, turned around three times, and settled down to stare at Flavia. "He killed twelve Muggles and a wizard by blowing up an entire street, supposedly using one curse."

"Is that unusual?" Fortuna asked. "Muggles can kill that many people at once."

"It is theoretically possible, but I think he might have hit a gas main—maybe by accident, because a lot of Purebloods don't know anything about Muggles. Same with the Aurors, they often don't know enough to take Muggle or chemical considerations into account."

Fortuna carefully suppressed her power and allowed herself to speculate. "If he survived, he probably didn't hit a gas main or he protected himself before he did. It would have been intentional, not an accident."

Flavia sighed. "You're right. We can think about it more tomorrow—later today, I suppose. It must be well past the witching hour by now, and we should leave before people start to get up. And we'll come with something for you, won't we?" Flavia said, rubbing her hands through Alexander's matted fur.

They drifted back downstairs and went down into the tunnel. "It's not as if we need to set everything up at once," Flavia said, "but it's something to aspire towards. I don't know where we could manage to get the supplies and glassware for a proper potions lab, after all."

Fortuna consulted herself. Most of the things Flavia would find useful could be found within the castle and acquired with only a bit of sneaking. "I'll see if I can think of something," she told her.

They made their way back from Hogsmeade in silence, and only the moon witnessed them sneak back inside the castle.

It was past three in the morning when they arrived back at Gryffindor Tower. "You're out past curfew," the Fat Lady said reprovingly.

"Yes, we are," Fortuna said, "but if you let us in, we won't be."

"I won't let you in without the password."

Fortuna compressed her lips.

"Fortuna Major," Flavia said with a smile.

The common room was empty save for the girl still doing homework. She didn't look up as the two of them tiptoed past her and back up to bed.

"Next time we'll get back at a reasonable hour," Flavia said in a whisper. "But don't worry, tomorrow won't be too bad."

She was wrong. Fortuna slept poorly and woke up sweating. Like so many other times before, only bits of her nightmare—the glimpse of _something _through a gap in the trees, the sound of a snarl, the sense of being chased—remained with her.

She pushed it out of her mind and was left groggy, irritable, and completely unable to engage with the breakfast she'd been looking forward to. She failed to appreciate the marmalade spread across the toast, the spoon crackling the crust, the jammy mixture catching and mingling with the melted butter. She shoveled it into her mouth as efficiently as possible, with as little effort as possible.

She sawed pieces off the kipper with her fork, and the smoky bronze fish obligingly fell apart. She pushed it into the yolk, dragging the fork there too, the gold bleeding into the white, before scooping up the blend of undoubtedly tasty food, chewing, and swallowing.

A double period of Herbology with the Ravenclaws only exacerbated her problems. Her breakfast conspired with the heat of the greenhouse and the calming plants they were potting to make her exhaustion more acute. She had to rely on her power to keep herself awake.

By the time noon was within sight, Fortuna wanted to punch somebody. Unfortunately, Candidus had behaved himself throughout class, even helping others with their potting. It made sense that he could connect better with plants more than he could connect with people, but it left her bereft of a target.

Until she remembered Professor Snape. Flavia wanted potions supplies, and his personal store in his office was by far the best place in the castle to find them. The cabinets in that room had been filled over the years with tattered books, partially melted cauldrons, and enough glassware to build a replica of Hogwarts. Some of these would be useful, but the ingredients were what she was really after. The Potions Master would immediately notice, but he would blame others.

A hand was on her shoulder, shaking her back to reality.

"Fortuna, are you still there?" Flavia asked.

The kitchens were located behind a picture of fruit that opened when the pear was tickled. Flavia wouldn't need any more coaching than that; the elves there were more than happy to help a first year asking for a picnic. She'd get a feast good enough for royalty and leave with nary an issue.

"Yes," Fortuna said. "I just want to know if you could do something for me."

* * *

As Fortuna descended several sets of stairs to the dungeons, the marble and granite walls of the upper floors gave way to dingy, damp gray stone. The dungeons were cold and wet, a mess of tunnels that led to who-knew-where and housed who-knew-what. She traced the potential paths with her power, saw that if she went this way she would run into a wall, and if she went that way she would end atop a cliff that jutted out over a lake. Her power told her most of the things she saw along the way weren't dangerous, but their existence may have been why the Potions classroom was so close to the surface.

Professor Snape was skulking in the backroom with one of his students. She opened the door slowly and edged her way inside without allowing the hinges to squeak. The classroom looked just the same as it had yesterday, only barren and motionless. Without the sound of students working, it almost felt like a crypt.

Fortuna crept over to a far cabinet and popped open a door, revealing a haphazard assortment of containers, condensers, and setups for extraction. A few threatened to tumble out, but she stopped them with precisely timed grabs. She stowed several important pieces in her satchel, but left far more than she took.

The ingredients were a different story. Flavia felt she needed a wide variety to work with; she wasn't sure what potions she needed to make until she had to make it. Fortuna took some of everything, from snake fangs to slugs. If it could fit in the bag, it went in the bag. She pinched relatively small amounts, but she had no doubt Professor Snape would detect the loss immediately; he was the type of man to take issue if his quill had rolled three inches to the right.

Her power told her to stash herself in the lower shelf of the cabinet she was currently digging through, so she did, quietly closing the door behind her. A few seconds later, Professor Snape burst from the backroom with the student following behind him, mid-conversation.

"Professor, you and I both know that the Hogwarts nurse can mend a scratch in less than twenty-four hours."

"Miss de Luce, do not presume to comment on what I know."

_De Luce?_

That would be Ophelia, Flavia's older sister and Head Girl.

"Sir, he is making our House look ridiculous. You're the only one who can lean on him."

Their muttering became quieter and quieter as they left the room. The door shut with a thud behind them. Fortuna waited five seconds for them to proceed down the hall before opening the door again and rolling out. Professor Snape would be gone for the next few minutes. She grabbed a few more things from the classroom shelves before going into his office to raid his private stores.

Fortuna had never pictured what a dungeon of a gloomy Potions Master would look like, but it fit Professor Snape perfectly. Eyeballs in jars turned to stare, embalmed animals floated in strangely hued fluids, and the dim lighting made it hard to tell what anything was. Cauldrons were either bubbling away with potions or hung up to dry for later use. Sheaves of parchment lay waiting atop Snape's desk. Fortuna noticed that there was only one chair; Professor Snape preferred to have his guests stand. Cabinets lined the walls, and she knew that was where she would find the most exotic and hazardous ingredients.

Her power led her to a drawer filled with gloves. She donned a pair and got to looting. As she tucked handful after handful into her bag, she realized this was about more than Sirius Black. Flavia just wanted to try out some potions her father had expressly banned her from attempting in their house or that she wasn't yet skilled enough to make but wanted to try.

Suddenly, her power told her to run. The command came so quickly that Fortuna hadn't realized that she'd finished before her feet started smacking stone. She was guided back through the classroom and out the door, turning away into an alcove and holding her breath.

Professor Snape passed her position a second later and disappeared into his sanctum. Fortuna exhaled and moved, hurrying up the stairs and into her dorm room (timing it so she could follow someone else and escape having to say the password), where she took a nap.

She opened her eyes twenty minutes before flying class, much more refreshed and less on edge. Flavia was there, stuffing a picnic basket underneath her bed. The food inside was enchanted to stay warm, and they discussed their plans for the evening as they made their way to the pitch.

"You'll love flying," Flavia told her, once she had done up her tie and pulled her robes on. "I think you've got just what it takes to be a Chaser."

"You've said," Fortuna replied, and finally asked her power what that meant. It was a position in a game called Quidditch, played on broomsticks, involving throwing balls through hoops to score points.

"Maybe you'll make the team next year. My mother, Harriet, played as a Keeper. It's brill."

The student body seemed to agree. By the time they arrived, most of their classmates were visibly shaking with anticipation at the chance to get on a broomstick. Jessica was a distance away from them with a small blond girl whose robe was scorched in a few places, complaining loudly about the state of athletics at Hogwarts.

"This is what they call gym? Sitting on your arse and jerking a broom around. Bloody mental. No wonder these blokes are walking around with my nan's body."

The Slytherins and Gryffindors formed small clusters that reminded her of most foster children she had known—all bunched up together but hardly interacting. That wouldn't do for Fortuna's plan, so she nudged Flavia and went over to talk to Jessica and the other girl, who proved to be one Astoria Greengrass.

"I see you had charms before this class," Flavia commented, probably noting the odd burn mark and smell of smoke.

The girl smiled a little wanly. "Yes. I didn't know feathers could blow up."

They milled around attempting to make small talk, until Madam Hooch came out and rounded everyone up like a sheepdog. Her voice was almost as shrill as her whistle, but it was a weapon she wielded to get students' attention: _Stand next to the broom. Call it up. Between your knees. Now push._

A breeze brushed against Fortuna as she lifted off the ground and fell back down on it. An electrifying buzz spread from the tips of her toes to the top of her head.

"Good," Madam Hooch said, "Everyone take off."

Fortuna took off into the air like a dolphin leaping through the waves, realizing for the first time that there was a different world once you breached the surface. The ground shrank below them as they took careful laps around the quad. The slow pace Madam Hooch had them moving at was not enough, but it would have to do.

For now.

Far too soon, they were asked to come down and sent back into the castle. Flavia and Fortuna completed all their homework for the weekend in between class and bedtime, and then camped out in the Gryffindor common room reading until nearly everyone else went to bed. Fortuna perused the book on the history of Transfiguration that she'd checked out.

Again they snuck out of Hogwarts and again they made their way into the Shrieking Shack. Alexander was waiting for them, and it became apparent to Fortuna he was more interested in the picnic basket than in either of them.

"I promised, didn't I?" Flavia said, once they'd lit enough candles to see by. "Here, the elves packed us all some sandwiches."

She opened the top and the whole thing unfurled into a blast of food and blanket. The sandwiches, accompaniments, and tea shot up into the air and gently touched down into a perfect arrangement.

"Well, dig in," Flavia said, giving Alexander a turkey sandwich.

Fortuna grabbed a sandwich of her own and bit into it.

Her eyes opened. There were _levels _of roast beef. She had only known the sad, generic cold cuts Mrs. Simmons bought from the deli, and now she could see that they were about as close to meat as sawdust was to wood. They came from the same phylum, but they'd stopped calling each other a long while back.

_This _sandwich was a transcendent experience. Horseradish, lettuce, the fragrance of garlic and sage, the peppery crust—it made her mouth water. Two thick slices of sourdough around it, the outside a crust that would rattle a knife, the inside an unhealthy bit of toast, crisped by the same beef fat. The slices were uneven, some thicker than others, but none so thick that they would prevent easy chewing—not that it would have been a problem with the meat, as pink and tender as it was.

Flavia emptied out a bowl of soup and filled it with water for Alexander. "Well, come on then, let's see what _you_ got us," she said, gesturing towards the bag.

Fortuna opened the pouch. Flavia wiped her hands on the front of her robe and started pulling out bottles and flasks, lining the little glass bundles before her like a general inspecting his formations.

"Fortuna," Flavia said, her eyes bright with glee, "you won't believe the things I can manage with these. Sirius Black won't know what's coming to him. But what should I do first? There are so many options. I had no idea you'd get this much."

"I just grabbed a little of everything while Professor Snape was out of his office," Fortuna said.

"I can't imagine he's happy."

Alexander looked up, and Fortuna passed him a second sandwich. "Not at all."

Abruptly, Flavia did a handstand. "Well, it's fine. He can cool his head over the weekend and hopefully take out whatever's left on Monday's students. Poor Hufflepuff."

Fortuna blinked. "Why are you standing on your head?"

"It helps with blood flow to the brain and lets you think better."

Fortuna accepted this with a shrug.

"And I've been thinking," Flavia continued, her left elbow wobbling a little before she shifted her weight, "we don't know where Black is, but if he's going to come to Hogwarts, he'll have to make it on foot. If we track him properly, we should have an idea of when he'll arrive. And when he does show up, we'll be ready for him."

Fortuna munched on a scone. The flavour hinted at apricot while the clotted cream was draped over the top like a cold duvet. Each bite had traces of sweetness, but none were particularly strong. She felt a vague disappointment.

Perhaps this was how scones were supposed to taste. Baking had never been an interest of hers.

"Why can't he just steal a Muggle car and drive up here?" Fortuna asked. "He could actually already be here, lurking around and waiting for the chance to get into the castle."

"Confound it," Flavia said. She let out a frustrated huff, teetering on her hands, then readjusted her stance firmly. "The reports are all we have to go on at the moment, unless we just want to follow Harry Potter around and wait for Black to spring out of the bushes at him. King George, would you care to assist me?"

Obediently, Alexander stood up and bounded over to Flavia. He caught her as she tumbled forward, turning what would have been a nasty spill into a gentle fall onto a shag rug. She strode over to a wall and pinned up a map that she pulled out of her pocket, dotting the locations with red pins.

"You said something about _reparo _this morning?" Fortuna asked, eyeing the last turkey sandwich. She was quite full, but she definitely had room.

"Yes! Let's start with that."

Flavia walked Fortuna through the steps necessary to cast the spell, and then she apologized to her own wand before casting it herself on a table.

"Is that part of the spell?" Fortuna asked.

"No, beech wands tend to explode if they get bored, and this one belonged to my Great Uncle Tarquin. I've been using it for a year, and every time I ask it to do something exceptionally quotidian—Daffy's word —I try to let it know that it won't be long before we can do _really _impressive things."

"Ah," Fortuna said, and was surprised when her power confirmed Flavia's assertion. "Would you like to have a bookshelf here?"

There _had _been a bookshelf there once, but was a pile of splinters now. Flavia pulled out her wand. With a quick _reparo_, the pieces began to fling themselves together and meld, until the shelf was returned to its former glory.

Flavia beamed and rubbed her hands. "Right, let's work on setting up the lab tonight. Regardless of where Sirius Black is, we need to be ready before he gets here. Lucky we have a guard dog here to protect our place from him. Isn't that right, King George?"

Fortuna looked over at the picnic blanket. The dog had stolen her sandwich.


	7. Chapter 7: Flying Blind

There were only so many times a person could ask the same question without result before falling into despair. Fortuna wasn't there yet, but she felt she was getting close. She asked her power to compare her persistence with the average person's, and learned that most people would have stopped trying twenty-six questions ago.

She rubbed her eyes, as though doing so could clear the fog in her mind's eye, and wrote down the words she and her mother and her uncle had spoken. Then she carefully stopped thinking about her family and asked herself where she could find people who spoke the language written on the parchment in front of her.

Nobody on the entire planet did. There were plenty of people who could understand it because it was close to Latin, but she wouldn't be able to find a native speaker or a community where it was used.

How did a language come to be not only forgotten, but _eliminated_ from memory? She'd understood it when she'd remembered it, and she understood the words now as she read them, but she couldn't formulate new sentences or conjure additional vocabulary on her own.

Perhaps there were others who simply didn't know because they _also_ couldn't remember.

But if that were true, what did it mean? She didn't think anyone could go around destroying people's memories en masse in some sort of world-spanning language removal conspiracy.

Well . . . _she_ could. But she wouldn't. That would be pointless.

Unless the language were dangerous, somehow?

Or she got very bored.

She slumped back in the overstuffed armchair she'd claimed for herself in the empty Gryffindor common room and glared at the parchment. The words stared up at her, mockingly worthless. Not a hint among them, nothing to grasp onto or use.

Useless.

Nobody was around to question her sudden proficiency in Charms, so she pointed her wand at her latest failure and said "_Incendio_." She'd woken up before everyone else on Sunday just to have some time alone to think about this, but now she wanted a distraction.

Fresh air would do.

It was just late enough that students were allowed to wander the halls without fear of detention, but early enough she wouldn't see anybody else; there was not a student in the world who'd be waking up at the crack of dawn the first weekend after classes started. Even though she knew that was the case, she still automatically checked her appearance for neatness before she left: tie straightened, shirt tucked, sweater smoothed down.

Strictly speaking, uniforms weren't required on the weekends, but she wasn't keen on wearing her Muggle hand-me-downs when she had something new and snazzy and more socially acceptable on hand. Besides, she liked the aesthetic and she'd rather get a reputation for unnecessary formality than poverty.

As she'd anticipated, Fortuna's walk down the stairs, across the grounds, and to the Quidditch stadium went unchallenged. Hogwarts kept a repository of brooms locked up in a cupboard for use during flying lessons, so she jimmied the door open and claimed the best one of the bunch to take for a spin.

Without Madam Hooch's instructions and others' eyes to hold her back, she leapt into the air, taking the broom ten times as high as she'd been allowed to on Friday. She hovered for a moment to scan her surroundings. The courtyard was empty, save for an animal or two. She twisted around and fell back down to earth in a screeching dive, levelling out inches from the ground. Then she cruised from grass to water, twisting patterns over the lake as she let her speed burn off.

Even as she swam circles through the air, her mind inevitably returned to her problems. It stood to reason that there _were_ others; an entire language didn't evolve and vanish overnight. There had been an entire community implied in her memory, and it was unlikely she was the only survivor; _someone_ had brought her to the hospital. But if there were others like her, how could she find them when she didn't remember them and they didn't remember her?

There were plenty of people in Britain who didn't remember their families, and she ran down the first ten or so on the list: dementia, dementia, dementia, brain damage, dementia. She thought about going one by one through every person without family in Britain, but there were tens of thousands on that list. And if she looked for people who looked like her—well, that number was so large, she was only able to comprehend it using her power.

The Hogwarts grounds could almost have been dreary. All of the colors were muted: dark greens, greys, and blacks beneath mist. Yet Fortuna would not have been able to find a single person who described it as anything but spectacular. The view was all natural, and nature didn't need to justify itself with light or cheery colors. The rolling hills and thriving fauna spoke for themselves.

_I want to know where I can find the hills that match the hills I saw when I encountered the Dementor._

Nowhere.

_I want to know where I can find scenery like the hills I saw when I encountered the Dementor._

Northern Italy, southern France, Corsica, Sardinia. What?

_I want to know where I'm from._

Fog.

The more she thought about it, the more she became convinced magic was involved. Memories, languages, and now entire landscapes stricken from existence? What but magic could be more powerful? What but magic could explain her symptoms?

Amnesia just _didn't_ manifest the way hers did. None of the normal ways someone lost their memory could possibly explain everything she had experienced. Most importantly, normal memory loss didn't warp people to the point where they didn't even think to question why their lives were missing. She had simply accepted she remembered her name but not the people who had given it to her, that she could read and speak English without remembering who had taught her, and that she had lived eight years without remembering who had spent them with her.

And now she had her first clue: Memory Charms.

Flying higher and higher, she set her eye on the Quidditch Stadium standing tall on the northern grounds of Hogwarts. She flew into the wooden structure, dodging and weaving between the stands, before flying over the pitch, to rest in mid-air.

She'd spent much of yesterday in her bed reading the detective stories she'd checked out of the library on Thursday. Memory charms were to magical mystery books as divine revelation, feminine intuition, mumbo-jumbo, jiggery-pokery, coincidence, and the Act of God were to Golden Age detective novels. It seemed to be considered bad sport, at least if the authors of _The Blighted Bludger, Delivery by Cross-Eyed Owl, _and _Spellbound Death_ were anything to go by.

It was easy to see why. "Obliviate" was simply too convenient to make for a compelling puzzle. It could eliminate any witnesses, generate any alibi, destroy any case, frustrate any detective. Novelists avoided using it as a gimmick because the real thing was too powerful, and her power—which could supply her with information about Memory Charms so long as she didn't apply the concept to herself—agreed with this conclusion.

_Lobotomization_ was not a word Fortuna threw around, but it was something that described the process of a Memory Charm gone bad. Not all gone, not all there, forced to operate off what pieces of themselves were left behind. Even minor uses of the spell struck her as immoral, and major uses seemed to leave their victims little more than blocks of Swiss cheese.

She didn't want to feel like a block of Swiss cheese.

This wasn't helping. She banked left from where she'd been looping around and flew back towards the broom cabinet.

There was a small crowd below, a group of students bedecked in red and gold, and the first one to notice her flew up to shout at her. "We have the pitch reserved. You have to get off."

Fortuna swiveled to face him, stopping on a dime. "What?" she asked.

"You have to get out of here," he blustered. "We have the pitch reserved. You can't just come out here and play around! We have some serious training to do."

She thought about responding insolently for a moment, but decided against returning his sass with interest. She was above such childish actions, and she'd already planned to wrap up anyway.

"All right," she said, and immediately flew down to land in front of the other students. If she joined the team next year as Flavia had suggested, this moment was the first impression her teammates would get of her flying, so she made the landing neat and sharp.

She didn't look at them to see their reactions; instead, she checked with her power as she sauntered past them.

Nobody had noticed.

The intense man who had shouted at her had gone off to inspect the goal posts at the other end of the field, which he evidently thought might have changed over the summer. The Beaters and Chasers were _definitely_ not paying attention to her, preoccupied as they were with a puzzling conversation they were having amongst themselves. Each Weasley twin was focused on one of the girls, but pretending not to be so the girls wouldn't notice; the girls had noticed, but were pretending not to have so the boys wouldn't know they'd tipped their hand so easily. On the surface, it was small talk about the summer holiday and classes so far; beneath the surface, it was was a tangled knot of plays, counterplays, wariness, insecurity, confusion, and hope. All five were fully on to each other and all five knew it, but they were keeping up the pretense because—her power made it very clear what all this was about, and she mentally flinched away.

The only one left was Harry Potter, and he hadn't witnessed her landing because he'd pushed his fingers up beneath his glasses to rub the sleep out of his eyes. She turned her head over her shoulder to see this other orphan for herself. He was closer to her own age and height than the others, and the fact he was thinking about breakfast instead of kissing endeared him to her.

She turned away so he wouldn't catch her staring.

Once Fortuna had returned the broom, she headed to the Great Hall for breakfast. She thought about her next steps while she helped herself to waffles artfully draped in glossy red preserves, with fresh samples of the same fruit atop that. Some sort of thickly whipped cream was smeared over in generous quantities.

She jabbed her fork down, securing the waffles, and cut them neatly into thirds with her knife. One quick turn of the plate, two more sawing motions, and it was in neat ninths, perfect bite-sized pieces.

The Simmonses had never provided anything half so good. She knew they received money from the government to subsidize the cost of feeding seven children, and she also knew that they never spent more than a third of it.

Another thing she hadn't bothered questioning.

The crisp waffle piece crunched in her mouth and she speared another and similarly dealt with it. The corner pieces went first as she saved the best for last, and the side pieces met their demise by being used to mop up the juices. She left only smears of pink on the plate before placing those sponges of flavor into her mouth.

The center, she stared at for a moment as she mulled her options over. The bottom one went first, and then the top, the center of it glutted with now pink cream and lingonberry mixture. She scooped it up with a spoon, cautious of spilling the bounty onto the plate. Into her mouth it went, and she was done.

Thus accomplished, Fortuna stopped off at Gryffindor Tower to shower and change, and when she left again it was for the library. She'd use the pretext of returning her mysteries and checking out more to engineer a meeting with someone who could answer questions without spreading around the fact she was asking them.

Step one was to avoid Madam Pince's detection by staying away from the path of her patrol. Step two was to select nine books, and step three was to make her way to one particular intersection between shelves. The stack teetered and tottered in her hands, but never came close to actually falling.

She hid amongst the stacks and waited. When her power told her to, she stepped out in front of a student. The other girl's nose was buried deep in a book, so much so that she didn't notice Fortuna. They collided. Fortuna landed a little ways away, safe, while the older girl cried out as she was pelted by falling mystery novels and tomes on mind magic.

"Oh no, I'm so sorry," the girl said, frazzled. Her hair was frizzy and there were bags under her eyes; she looked like she desperately needed sleep. It took a second for Fortuna to recognize her as the girl whose books they had knocked over three nights ago.

"No, _I'm_ sorry," Fortuna said, brushing herself off. "It's my fault. I grabbed all those books without being able to see over them. I guess I didn't expect to see anyone else here on a Sunday morning. I'm so thoughtless."

"Oh, no, I should have watched where _I_ was going. Madam Pince didn't see, did she?"

The girl ducked her head around a bookshelf, but the librarian was preoccupied chastising some older students about their volume. She breathed a sigh of relief. "We're fine. Good, I couldn't be banned from the library. I'm in the middle of two projects and if she kicked me out—oh, what am I saying. Here, let me help."

She started grabbing at books, but didn't even try to stop herself from reading each title before she stuck it on the growing pile in Fortuna's hands.

"Memory Charms? Are they teaching you that this early in the year? That can't be right, I've only heard of it in Defense. I suppose I can see how it would be useful—"

Fortuna cut her off before her speculation could run wild.

"It's not really for class," she said. "It's just something I was a little interested in and, well, Professor Flitwick told me I could write a couple of feet for extra credit. I'm worried I might not be doing well enough for the first few days, being a Muggle-born…"

The other girl's eyes lit up. She hurried to retrieve the last of the books and Fortuna used her power to follow the girl to one of the tables without spilling the books again.

"Well, if that's what you're worried about, I'd be happy to help," she said, waiting patiently for Fortuna to drop the leaning tower of texts before reaching for a handshake. "I'm Hermione Granger."

"Fortuna Floris. It's nice to meet you."

"So, what are you looking for?" Hermione asked, sorting the books into neat piles based on topic, focus, and level, in that order.

"How to restore people's memories once they've been Obliviated. I understand what happens when the spell takes hold, but I want to know what to do when you want to get your memories back."

"I don't think that's possible," Hermione told her. "Well, it's… there aren't really spells to do that. The last Defense teacher had to be moved to St. Mungos, that's the Wizarding hospital, because they couldn't get his memories back after a, uhm, accident made him lose them. Being Obliviated is a one-way street."

"So what happens in cases like that, when there's a mistake?" Fortuna asked. "What if someone lost their memories who shouldn't have. Or who wanted to get them back? What then?"

"There shouldn't be mistakes. The Defense Professor was a—" Hermione paused as her cheeks pinkened. "A con-artist. A criminal who accidentally cast the spell on himself. The Ministry has a team of Wizards who are qualified to use it safely when they find it crucial for keeping the Wizarding world safe."

"Oh," Fortuna replied, her power forcing her body to shrink into itself, "so it's pointless then? I was going to center my whole report around this."

"No, not exactly. There's no spell or potion or other guaranteed way to get the memories back, but that doesn't mean that people always lose their memories permanently," Hermione said, lapsing into a lecture as she flipped through one of the books Fortuna had grabbed. "There aren't enough cases to form a conclusive theory, but there has certainly been a trend you could base an essay on."

She set the open book down on the table in front of Fortuna, who looked down to see two pages covered in annotated graphs. "This is some data from Saint Mungo's. There's some indication that lost memories resurface after exposure to trauma, but there aren't a lot of case studies."

Blood in her mouth. Her mother screaming. Not moving as she watched her parents die.

"I see," Fortuna said. Hermione was thinking of torture, but exposing herself to Dementors was the same general neighborhood, and she would be able to control that eventually. "I just have one more question. When someone takes memories away, do they put fake ones in?"

"Well, yes, Memory Charms are often used in tandem with implanting false memories to throw people off the fact something has been altered."

"How real does that feel from the inside?" Fortuna asked, thinking about the fragments of her dreams she could remember. A beach, a white hallway, a woman in a lab coat. "Can the false memories change a person's feelings or alter dreams? Or show up in dreams at all?"

Hermione looked confused. "No, I don't think I've ever heard of anything like that before. The false memories would be the ones that they can remember when consciously trying to think about it."

Fortuna thought about it. If her dreams represented implanted memories, then she should be able to remember them. If she couldn't, then why would someone have implanted these memories in her? And what she could remember from her dreams didn't line up with what an eight year old could logically have experienced, so they couldn't be _her_ original memories. It didn't make any sense, and she said so aloud.

"Well," Hermione said, a little huffily, "That's what the books say, and the books are what you need to write your paper. I'm sorry, I need to get back to what I was doing. It was nice meeting you."

"Thank you," Fortuna said automatically. "You too, Hermione."

Hermione left to go get her books, while Fortuna stared down at hers. Hermione hadn't been wrong; the books corroborated what she had said.

That some people had recovered parts of their memory and that she had done the same confirmed the theory that memories weren't actually destroyed by the spell. Some parts of them remained.

She looked at the graphs Hermione had showed her, case studies of people who had partially overcome Memory Charms. She asked herself about them, and found a dozen of them were still alive and in Britain. She could Owl them, though she'd have to use her power to persuade them to open up about their experience to a strange child via post.

The books were no longer necessary, so she left the stack of nonfiction, checked out her mysteries, and headed back to Gryffindor Tower. Flavia would be waking up soon and Fortuna could owl her leads and consider the problem of the lost language later.

Something snagged on her thoughts.

Hadn't she just been introduced to something else that wasn't Latin but sounded like it?

_Incendio, reparo, lumos._

She asked herself more questions. Wizards didn't know where magic came from and they didn't understand how or why it worked. They were content to operate within the system, but they didn't know who had set it up or why it was the way it was. At some point that knowledge had gotten lost, and here she had stumbled upon a lost country, a lost language, and a lost people.

Was there a connection?

Fog.

She suspected that meant she was on the right track.

Who to go to for help?

Again, teachers were out; they'd _notice_. Most of the student body didn't know enough to be useful. Daphne de Luce was a possibility, but she'd be suspicious of Fortuna's motivations and would be actively unhelpful once she realized her interrogator was friends with Flavia.

So she rushed to catch up with Hermione, who was simply happy to show off her knowledge, and who wouldn't question why anyone else would want that knowledge.

But when Fortuna found the older girl, she wasn't alone. Her books had been spilled all over the floor, again, and three other boys were standing nearby, laughing. Two of them were burly nonentities, and the blond one in the middle screamed posh in all the wrong ways for Fortuna and she couldn't help but compare him to a dyed, more insufferable Candidus. Her power identified him as the one who'd started this by knocking Hermione's books out of her hands.

Fortuna automatically shrank back, preparing to steal away. This wasn't her problem, and she could always run Hermione down and pick her brains later.

But was that what she wanted to do?

Hermione interrupted their laughter. "Why am I not surprised you have nothing better to do than get in the way of other people doing actual work, Malfoy?"

"Too bad all the work in the world won't make up for who you are, Granger. It's why you do it, isn't it?" asked the blond. He looked at the others. "She's trying to compensate, isn't she?"

The goons laughed, and Fortuna knew that the taunt had stung.

No, Fortuna decided. No, it was not. She slid unobtrusively behind Hermione and picked her pocket while she was collecting her books.

Then she threw the stolen bronze Knut at Malfoy, striking him between his eyes.

"Ow!" he exclaimed. "What?"

Fortuna stepped forward, putting herself in between Hermione and the others. "Shut up," she said.

All attention turned to her.


	8. Chapter 8: Malfoiled

Fortuna took a moment to assess the situation. The blond Slytherin was pressing the fingers of his left hand—his right arm was in a sling—to the nasty red mark rising on his forehead. She had a few seconds to think; he was too taken aback to act and his lackeys weren't proactive enough to do anything but stare at their stunned boss.

She looked ahead to the next five minutes. There was going to be a fight. A couple dozen spells would get cast, the noise and shouting would draw the attention of a professor, and everyone would get detention.

Including her.

That was unacceptable. She couldn't afford even one black mark on her record.

Hermione straightened up, but she'd missed Fortuna's attack and didn't know why Malfoy had shouted. "She's right, Malfoy," she said. "You _should_ shut up."

Malfoy lowered his hand, ignoring Hermione's words. "That was a mistake," he said. He drew his wand from his left pocket, awkwardly transferred it to his right hand, and pointed it at Fortuna. "What do you think you're doing?"

He'd meant his question to be rhetorical, but it was dumb enough to be given an answer. She made her decision and her power mapped out the way forward. "Leaving," she said. "Come on, Hermione."

Hermione didn't move. Her eyes darted between the three Slytherins as she assessed the situation, and her hand moved in the direction of the pocket of her robes.

"No!" Malfoy said. "You attacked me and I'm not about to let you get away with that."

"No she didn't," Hermione said indignantly. "Her wand's not even out!"

"Not with magic, of course, because she doesn't know any." He turned his attention back to Fortuna, looking down his nose at her. It was an unimpressive feat; she was short. "Muggleborn, are you?"

Fortuna shrugged. "Most likely."

"Muggleborn _and_ a bastard, then," he sneered. "Well, _I_ know who my father is and you ought to learn. I'll do you a favor and help you start your career at Hogwarts out right by teaching you a lesson about how our world works."

He continued in that vein for a while, and Fortuna considered the tone, inflection, and cadence of his voice while the professor she was relying on got closer and closer. He sounded like Candidus—or Flavia, she had to admit, especially when she was excited. Coming from Flavia, it sounded like a natural and unconscious self-assurance. Coming from Malfoy, it sounded like inbreeding.

"_Flipendo_," Malfoy said, when at last he'd finished.

She'd already lowered her shoulder by the half-inch necessary to dodge the jinx.

"It's against the rules to use magic in the corridors, Malfoy," Hermione said, already working through spells in her own head. By now her hand was gripping her own wand, though she hadn't yet drawn it.

"Then don't use any, Granger." He shrugged his hand out of its sling and cast the spell again. "_Flipendo_!"

Fortuna, having moved slightly while his attention had been on Hermione, simply wasn't where he'd aimed. The other two Slytherins decided to get on board with their leader's plan and started trying to hit Fortuna with knock-back jinxes of their own. Hermione would have drawn then, but Fortuna stumbled into her wand arm as she avoided the spells with a series of unnecessarily showy dodges.

"_Tarantallegra_!"

Fortuna had already recovered and started to leap back before he'd finished the word. The jinx hit a suit of armor and its legs began to jerk spasmodically. She nudged one of Hermione's books into one of the suit's sollerets, which redirected it into the path of the goons' next spells, where it conveniently shielded Hermione and flew to pieces.

The girls avoided being struck by the hail of spaulders, poleyns, and gauntlets because Fortuna had already tripped into Hermione, knocking her over. Half the floor must have heard the clatter, but the only one who mattered was the Professor of Ancient Runes. She stopped in her tracks, sighed, cursed her decision to become a teacher, and began power-walking towards them.

After a few more seconds of Fortuna evading the Slytherins' oncoming spells in just such a way that her overblown flailing knocked Hermione's assorted limbs clear of the attacks, the professor finally arrived.

"Mr. Malfoy!" The professor's shout reverberated throughout the hallway. "What do you think you are doing?"

Her voice echoed, and her question repeated itself in the silence that followed her arrival.

There was no good answer, either—no reason why an older boy was threatening two unarmed girls who were lying on the floor amidst a pile of books and a tumble of armor. Malfoy looked at the professor and then back to Hermione, before stuffing his wand into his robes.

"Professor—"

"Detention for using magic in the corridors, Mr. Malfoy. A week of detention for the three of you."

"Professor, _she_ started this," Draco said, pointing a finger right at Fortuna.

"A first year?" the professor said, a little sarcastically. She was far an impartial judge. Hermione was already shaping up to be the star pupil of her Ancient Runes class, and her interest in the professor's subject had earned a measure of goodwill that did not extend to Malfoy and his cronies. She turned to Fortuna, who was helping Hermione up, and gave her a hard look. "You are a first year, aren't you?"

Fortuna said she was. She broke eye contact and looked at her feet, like she was worried she had done something wrong by being a first year in front of a professor.

"Where's your wand?"

"In my back pocket, Professor."

"Did you attack Mr. Malfoy?"

"No, Professor. I did…" She broke off and let her voice waver a little. "I did tell him to shut up."

If Fortuna hadn't known to look for it, she would have missed the twitch of the professor's lips.

"They knocked my books all over, Professor Marchbourne," Hermione interjected. "Then they started insulting me. It's what started this."

"Thank you, Miss Granger. Do you need any help? Are you hurt?"

"No," Hermione said hotly, "And neither is _he_. He's pretending his arm's been seriously injured by Buckbeak, but it isn't. He's _faking_ to get Hagrid in trouble."

"Liar," Malfoy spat. "And that girl threw something at me, a coin or something small like that. I had to defend myself, even though I'm injured."

Fortuna thought that if he'd thought to point at his own forehead, he might have had a more convincing case. She further thought that he was lucky she hadn't been given the option to pelt him in the face with a steel greave.

The professor sized her up again, and found nothing in her face or stance to indicate she was anything other than an innocent eleven year-old scared that she was going to get in trouble at her new school. "So you had to defend yourself against a wandless first year who's been at Hogwarts less than four days. Is that what you're saying, Mr. Malfoy?"

The boy turned pink and began to stammer.

"A likely story," the Professor said. "Show me the coin she threw at you, would you, Mr. Malfoy?"

The Slytherins eyed the ground like a flock of magpies, but aside from the scattered pieces of Arthurian armorment, there was nothing small that could have been used by a projectile, let alone a coin. The professor scoffed and led them off to discuss the particulars of their detention.

After the trio of boys had been pulled away, she began, once again, to help Hermione pick her things off the floor. "Thank you for coming to help me," the older girl said, "But I could have handled them myself."

Fortuna felt a brief spike of annoyance at the other girl's condescension, but she quashed it once she realized Hermione was simply concerned about a younger student involving herself in trouble. She schooled her features into an appropriately repentant look. "I'm sorry about all the fuss, but I wanted to ask you another question."

Hermione's forehead wrinkled. "Ask me another question?"

"Like we discussed in the library. Just now, before all this."

There was an awkward pause, then a look of comprehension flooded Hermione's face. "Oh, right. In the library, yes! Of course. Sorry, I have so much going on—everything's so confused—Malfoy made me forget—what were we talking about?"

"Memory Charms," Fortuna said slowly. She was seized by a sudden concern that her amnesia was contagious—but no, that was stupid. Something else was wrong with this picture, and she asked herself what it was.

"Right," Hermione said, scrabbling for mental purchase. Her brisk nod did not convince Fortuna she knew what was going on. "Right. Of course. Sorry, and what about them?"

Her power explained that her past was in Hermione's future. This Hermione was about to travel back into time in order to study—and two hours in her future, ten minutes in Fortuna's past, she would meet Fortuna. The Hermione _she_ had just spoken to had gone the opposite direction to the groundskeeper's cottage.

The phrase _time turner_ came to mind. Interesting, but not immediately useful for someone in her shoes. She needed answers about something that had happened considerably more than six hours in the past. It was a possibility to bear in mind, but it wasn't presently relevant.

"You gave me a good starting point, not to worry. I was wondering about something else—something about the history of magic. But we could talk about it later."

"Of course, but really I think Professor Binns would be more useful for you—to begin with, I mean. Have you had his class yet?"

Fortuna shook her head, and Hermione bustled off, leaving her standing in a pile of armor. The professor hadn't bothered putting it back together, so she did, using her power to identify and cast the spell. The knight's return to its dais revealed the errant knut lying on the ground, where it had been concealed from the professor's view by a handguard. She picked it up and considered it.

She would, of course, restore the money to its rightful owner. Hermione wouldn't notice the coin's absence, nor would she notice its return. In a few weeks, she would spend it on candy at Hogsmeade. A few days after that, it would find its way into the hands of a bartender, who would give it as change to a man called Fetters, who'd send it to his niece in Cheshire, who...

She cut herself off.

As a rule, she didn't interfere with money. She was young, and a child who suddenly acquired wealth would be noticed. Besides, other people needed it in a way she did not; she could get whatever she might want via other means.

And right now, what she wanted was to exact a little revenge for what Draco Malfoy had said about her family. It was true that she had baited him, that she had more or less chosen for him to say what he had—but her power wouldn't have given her that option if he hadn't really felt that way.

As she walked back to Gryffindor Tower, walking a little more slowly than usual so that she could conveniently arrive at the same time as someone else and thereby avoid having to say the password, Fortuna asked herself how the Malfoy family had acquired and retained their wealth.

Some balancing of the scales might be due.

* * *

There were few things Fortuna hated more than History, and dealing with it was a task she'd delegated to her power within the first minute of the first time she'd been told to open her social studies textbook. She never asked her power to tell her what actually had or had not happened—she asked it to write the expected answers on her tests without bothering to consider any of the twaddle her hand might scrawl.

Of course there were reasons people _said_ history was relevant, but they were all bunk. She'd heard that those who did not remember the past were doomed to repeat it, but she knew that people did _not_ avoid mistakes even if they'd memorized a load of dates and "facts" that were not, her power assured her, usually facts at all. She knew what the actual facts were, to wit: that history class always was a complete waste of time, that history class always had been a waste of time, and that history class always would be a waste of time.

The student body at Hogwarts seemed to agree. When one of the first year boys said their first class that morning was History of Magic, the older Gryffindors said that having to deal with Professor Binns on a Monday morning was hard luck. As they took their seats, Flavia mentioned that neither of her sisters had anything positive to say about the class or their professor, whom they bemoaned as dull and oblivious. Fortuna suggested that, when it came to history classes, listening to a dead guy drone on and on was really just cutting out the middle-man.

Luckily for her, even dead professors still allowed the student body to harass them after class with questions. Professor Binns didn't get nearly so much of it—being a boring man who taught a boring subject boringly helped with that—so Fortuna had a clear shot at him before he could phase through a wall.

"Professor, if I could have a word with you."

He looked around, confused, and finally he noticed the girl in front of him. He adjusted his spectacles as he focused on her. "Can I help you, Miss...?"

"Floris, sir. I wanted to ask you a question about something not covered in the lecture material."

"Very well," Professor Binns said. He sounded disinterested and clearly wished he were elsewhere, as though he had anything to do besides haunt the staffroom.

"I wanted to ask some questions on the history of magic," Fortuna said. "Specifically where magic comes from. Are there any generally accepted theories on who created it or where they were from?"

The ghost scowled. "Miss—" He faltered as he'd already forgotten her name. "Young lady, I do not teach myths or legends in this class, only cold, hard facts. 'Atlantis' does not exist and never did, and our craft was certainly not _gifted_ to us by _extraterrestrials_. If you wish to indulge in idle, baseless speculation, I suggest you take out a subscription to the Quibbler. I will not countenance such prattle, if I see anything of that bent in your essays, I will mark you down. If that is all."

Not waiting for a response, the ghost turned away and swept through the nearest wall. He didn't even glance back as he disappeared.

Whatever Fortuna had expected, it hadn't been _that_. Apparently she'd touched a nerve. She consulted her power. Evidently the topic was a sore spot among historians. Nobody knew where magic had come from, and the handful of explanations presented were less theories and more fairy tales.

So much for mainstream history. Was there anything behind the theories that might be found in whatever the "Quibbler" was? No, not at all. It was a one-man tabloid run by someone who was completely barking.

Then she asked herself about "Atlantis." No fog there: it wasn't a real place and it hadn't ever been a real place. Nor were the legends about it founded in fact at all; it was a metaphor a Greek Muggle had created when he was talking about philosophy.

As for aliens granting special powers to humans? Absurd. What she'd seen had nothing to do with aliens; the monsters were twisted humans and the land she'd seen had been earth. And it seemed that if she wanted to know where that land and its people had gone, she would have to do her own work.

Standing around as the classroom filled up with the next period's students wasn't going to get her anywhere. Fortuna followed her professor's example and departed, fuming slightly, once she'd grabbed something that wouldn't be missed. The one time in her life she had a question that historians should be able to answer was the one time they couldn't. It seemed she would have to do their job for them, and she couldn't think of anything more annoying.

"Hey! Fortuna! Hey!"

Angelique. The voice had started from down the hall, but it was getting closer and closer with every word. Fortuna suppressed the temptation to increase her pace. Today was an important step in implementing her plan to stay unnoticed, and Angelique was a critical part of that. The key, even.

Angelique tried to grab her shoulder, but Fortuna dodged the overly familiar greeting by turning to face the smiling Hufflepuff encroachment.

"It looked like you were going to make a run for it. Didn't you hear me?"

Fortuna shook her head and smiled ruefully. "I was lost in thought."

"I know what you mean," Angelique said. "I think I might be dreaming. I know I fell asleep in class, but I don't know if I've woken up yet."

"You didn't fall asleep," Fortuna said. "You just wanted to."

Angelique burbled on without taking note of this interjection. "I've got a bunch of people meeting in the library in fifteen minutes. Can you bring Flavia?"

"She's already on the way to the library," said Fortuna. "I had to stay behind to ask a question."

The other girl beamed. "Already hard at work?" She continued without waiting for an answer, "Henry is going to help us kickstart our study group, but he can't start until next week."

She didn't identify Henry, so Fortuna got her power to do it for her. He was a fifth-year whose eagerness to help anyone and work ethic would counterbalance his only slightly above average grades. He was also vulnerable to candy; all Angelique had done to recruit him was drop one hint that chocolate frogs might be on the table, and his hand signed that metaphorical contract.

Meanwhile, Angelique was still talking. "I asked Jessica and Candidus at breakfast, so they should already be there."

They were, Fortuna knew, but she didn't say so. Instead, she let herself endure the small talk and introductions to two other Hufflepuffs, Zachary Bangbourne and Derek Oakthorn. They were both brown-haired, round, and eager, and Fortuna had difficulty telling them apart.

Not that she needed to. Her power would do it for her.

When she got to the library, she split off from the Hufflepuffs so she could go round up Flavia. Her partner in crime had seized a table in a corner remote enough that Fortuna wouldn't have been able to find her on her own.

Flavia did not want to join the study group and said so. She said she didn't think she would get any academic value out of it—her actual thought process was much blunter about her classmates' intellectual capabilities—and Fortuna knew full well that she was correct.

"I believe I could get good marks without help as well," Fortuna said. "But there are other considerations. Friendship, connections, simply enjoying school as such."

It was a weak argument, but it was only her first. She was going to persuade Flavia, but it wouldn't be through the logic of a specific argument; it would be through the way she said it, the way she would advance so many arguments so quickly. Flavia would pay less heed to the words and more to the fact Fortuna would brook no refusal. In the end, her friend would concede simply to make her happy.

"I doubt it would be any better than just studying on our own. Socializing might actually be a distraction."

"It would help the others," Fortuna continued. "A variety of different perspectives and strengths will provide insights and understanding impossible to achieve on their own."

Flavia seemed preoccupied with her ink bottle. "You could join on your own," she said. "I wouldn't be upset."

Not completely true, but she believed it was.

"But it just wouldn't be the same without you," Fortuna said. "I need help in potions as much as anyone who isn't you."

"I've been immune to flattery ever since our chef said I'd make nearly as good a cook as her one day," Flavia said grumpily. But her grumpiness didn't quite sound convincing.

"And do you _really_ think someone like Professor Snape should determine our classmates' entire experience with Potions? Do you think he _deserves_ that kind of influence?"

Flavia threw up her hands. "Pax," she said. "Stop. No more. I concede. I will join your study group." She began to pack up her things. "You really want to do this."

"I've read mysteries set in boarding schools." Fortuna shrugged. "Now that I'm actually here…There is a way things _should_ be, if you know what I mean. Ordinary students by day, rogue detectives by night."

Flavia chewed her lip in order to suppress a smile. "Rogue _potioneers_. I suppose it could provide some cover."

"Precisely."

* * *

Counting the two Gryffindor girls, Angelique had corralled seven first years into her study group. Candidus had come by himself because his efforts at making friends in his own house had thus far been fruitless for reasons known only to Fortuna and everyone he'd approached, while Jessica had brought the blonde girl Fortuna had noticed with her during flying class. She introduced herself as Astoria Greengrass and everyone took their seats.

"So," Angelique said, "What's everyone been up to?"

"I'd say a hair under five foot," Jessica said with a pointed glance at the Gryffindors.

"I'm surprised you can still see us from all the way up there," Flavia said coolly, though not as coolly as she'd intended, before turning her attention back to the Hufflepuff. "Nothing much. We've just been settling in."

"I don't know if I'd call annoying _Draco Malfoy_ 'nothing much,'" Astoria commented, looking at Fortuna. "That was you, wasn't it?"

It seemed the Slytherins were a little more gossipy than she would have preferred, and she was a little surprised to learn that Malfoy had shared anything. In his place, Fortuna would have found the experience humiliating and kept quiet about it. But no, her power confirmed; this scion of one of the proudest and most prominent families in his society possessed so little dignity that he'd spent the majority of the previous day stalking about the Slytherin common room and vowing revenge on the feral Mudblood who had assaulted him.

She put on a show of total bewilderment. "I don't think so," she said.

"He said a first-year Gryffindor girl attacked him, which gives us five possibilities." Astoria lifted her left hand, all five fingers outstretched to indicate said possibilities.

"Oh, that _definitely_ wasn't me," Fortuna said. She made herself sound relieved, as though the possibility of being in Draco Malfoy's bad books was very intimidating and she was glad to have ruled herself out. "I didn't attack anyone."

"Well, he said someone did." She lowered her pinky and ring finger. "Not de Luce and not Blackstone, he would have recognized them."

"Odd," Flavia remarked, in an uncharacteristically snooty voice that Fortuna recognized as an imitation of her oldest sister's. "_I_ wouldn't have recognized _him_."

She was lying, and Astoria knew it, but she didn't try to argue. Instead, she refocused on Fortuna and lowered her middle finger as she continued talking. "He said it was someone with black hair, which puts Amica out—she could be mistaken for a Weasley."

Fortuna regarded Astoria, wondering where she was going with this. An opportunist, she judged. The Slytherin had come here to see what the fuss was about and to decide whether she'd try to gain standing with her peers by warning Fortuna, or to try to curry favor with her older housemates by reporting on Gryffindor antics to Malfoy.

"That leaves you and Romilda Vane. But he also said it was a M—Muggle-born and Romilda's a Pureblood." She raised her now solitary thumb for emphasis. "The person who attacked him must have been you."

Flavia snorted. "A logically compelling argument, if you accept your premises. But you've overlooked the obvious possibilities, which is that he was lying or wrong."

"I think he must be lying," Fortuna said slowly. "I did run into three Slytherin boys in the halls yesterday, but _they_ attacked _me_. Tried to jinx me and a teacher stepped in before I could get hurt."

Astoria nodded sagely, as though she'd suspected that had been the case all along. It seemed that Draco's dramatic antics weren't confined to hallway standoffs, and Fortuna's account rang more true than Draco's tale. The scales tipped slightly in her favor; Astoria believed her and felt a little sympathy.

That sympathy wouldn't stop Astoria from trying to play both sides and she'd _definitely_ be reporting that Flavia de Luce had publicly thrown her support behind his attacker, but it was a start. He wouldn't forget his grudge, but he would be smarter—or at least quieter—about acting on it. For a while, anyway. When he thought the Head Girl wouldn't notice.

"Draco..." Jessica rubbed her chin. "That'd be the blond tosser always walking around the common room and talking about himself?"

Astoria was scandalized, both by Jessica's dismissal of a member of the ruling class and the fact she was sharing intrahouse drama with people outside of Slytherin. "_Draco Malfoy_ is the son of a very important man and it wouldn't be a good idea for you to be spreading rumors about him, or worse, insulting him."

"Fuck him," Jessica said.

Flavia hauled her potions textbook out of her bag. "I can't help but notice that _he_ is spreading rumors about and insulting Fortuna."

"Fuck him," Jessica said again.

This was leading up to a fight that would be big enough to get them kicked out of the library and would drive Astoria out of the study group. Jessica wouldn't back down and Astoria would work herself up into a self-righteous rage about treating the older Slytherins with respect, particularly in public. The Hufflepuff boys and Candidus wouldn't be of any help, and Angelique was already wringing her hands over everyone not just getting along.

Fortuna nudged Flavia, who nodded a little and cut off the brewing battle by slamming her book on the table so hard it shook a little.

Jessica whistled. "You smashed that harder than I smashed your mum last night."

Everyone else looked baffled by this comment, which redirected some of the tension into confusion. The truth was that not even Jessica knew what the phrase she'd said meant, but Fortuna suddenly did, wished she didn't, and allowed some of her irritation to show. "_If_ we could focus on why we're here, we have a potions assignment due tomorrow. I believe that will be everyone's worst class."

The mood turned damp as a marsh and everyone was scowls and frowns as they opened their potions textbooks. All except for Flavia, who started drumming her fingers on her open textbook to release some of her excitement, and Astoria, who was casting baleful glances at the other members of the group. She felt as though her classmates' attitude was a condemnation of Snape—and she was right.

"So," Flavia said, once everyone had opened their books and gotten over their initial sulk. "Professor Snape couldn't teach Zygmunt Budge how to brew a cure for boils, so we're going to learn it ourselves."

"Professor Snape is competent," Astoria said defensively. "If you have any issues with him, you can bring them to him. He's very fair."

The Hufflepuff boys immediately started to grumble. "You were there," one of them, Bangbourne, said. "You saw him vanish half our house's potions and none of yours! And he took a point away from Derek for not knowing an answer and called it cheek!"

Angelique stayed quiet because it was her policy not to say anything at all if she couldn't say anything nice, but she nodded when Oakthorn added that Snape wasn't as harsh on the Slytherins.

"Numerous sources have informed me that Snape is predisposed to thinking better of his own students than others," Candidus announced. "I've heard about him, and his behavior last week does nothing to make me think the reports I've heard are wrong."

"He knows a lot more than you do, or you'd be teaching potions," Astoria snapped. "Being intimidating and no-nonsense doesn't mean he's _ignorant_ or _biased_. Maybe he was hard on you because you were wrong and getting potions wrong is dangerous!"

Things started to heat up again, and Fortuna knocked over Candidus's gargantuan copy of _An Unabridged Compendium of Helpful Herbs_. It fell to the table like a toppled building.

"That's my book," Candidus complained, annoyed at her touching it even though he could recite all of it from memory.

Madam Pince poked her vulture-like head around a corner and glared at them. The students settled down and were completely silent until she moved on.

"Candidus might be wrong," Flavia said. "But he's right that Snape was horrid about it. He'll ruin potions for everyone, and that's just _unjust_. Page twelve?"

Flavia took them all through the assigned material with ease, with the Hufflepuffs interrupting frequently to ask questions. Jessica was scribbling down notes as fast as Flavia could talk and Candidus even managed to add something about a herb from time to time that made some sense.

Astoria alone was recalcitrant. "This doesn't make any sense," she said. "Stirring in that pattern isn't what the book says to do."

"The book teaches you how to make a potion that's good enough for a first year," Flavia responded. "But there are ways to refine it. Quills work better if they're turned clockwise, because going from east to west emulates the solar cycle."

"Professor Snape would have mentioned it if it was something we needed to know," Astoria argued. ''Otherwise, it's just a useless piece of knowledge to make yourself try and look smarter than you really are."

Flavia hauled a much older book out of her bag and shoved her it in front of Astoria, which showed a diagram of a man stirring porcupine quills in a silvery broth in a clockwise motion. "You'll look exactly as stupid as you are when your potion turns purple instead of indigo."

"You keep mouthing off and you're gonna be the one turning purple," Jessica said with a grin.

"Miss de Luce is right," Candidus said. "But my sources say Professor Snape would never accept an answer he didn't tell us, even if it is the correct answer."

"Sources?" Jessica chortled. "Where the blooming hell are you finding them? A bloody dealer by the loo? You don't have _sources_, you don't even have friends."

"_My cousin_," he pressed on, glaring at her, "informed me that it's better to leave something out than to be marked wrong for including a fact he didn't cover."

Astoria wanted to protest the unfair characterization of her head of house, but settled for silent grimacing. Flavia outwardly accepted his attempt at peacemaking, but Fortuna knew she was internally fantasizing about poisoning Astoria as revenge for calling her pretentious. Fortuna would have to thank her friend for helping everyone later in spite of the indignities.

Paper piled up as notes were taken and essays were hashed out, with some requiring a little more attention than others. After an hour, Jessica threw herself back in her chair and groaned.

"I had a better time at my grandpa's funeral," she announced. "I thought magic would be about fireballs, turning people into toads, the choice stuff. Can't we just skip to that? Let's blow something up."

"Would you like to be the one to tell Headmaster Dumbledore how his classes should be going?" Astoria asked. "At least we have Defense Against the Dark Arts later. That should be interesting."

Candidus took it upon himself to inform everybody that Defense Against the Dark Arts was completely unpredictable, due to the fact the teacher changed every year. It could be _positively stellar_ or it could be _shamefully atrocious_, and who could say in advance? Nobody, he averred.

Fortuna could, but she didn't care. "It can't be as bad as History," she said, as she finished packing her things.

This was a point that stood uncontested.

"You're leaving?" Flavia asked, a little sharply. She didn't say "me with _these_ people?" but she didn't have to.

Fortuna smiled at her, acknowledging the unspoken half of the sentence. "I have something very important I need to do."

"And what's that?" Jessica asked.

"Nap," Fortuna said. Flavia would understand being abandoned for a few hours if she said she was going to sleep; they'd stayed up until three finishing setting up their potions lab in the Shrieking Shack.

"But it's lunchtime," Angelique said.

"It is," Fortuna said over her shoulder. Her brisk walk cleared four bookshelves before anyone could manage to get a word in and by that point she was free. No one was going to risk Madam Pince's wrath by yelling in the library.

Her exit had been abrupt, but she wasn't leaving just to slack off. She wanted to spend some time in the owlery without anyone noticing she'd gone, which meant she'd have to be done and asleep before Flavia finished lunch and got back to Gryffindor Tower.

Draco Malfoy was a problem—or, rather, he would become a problem if he were allowed to continue on his current path. He was wealthy, connected, and had an obsessive streak a mile wide. She'd drawn his attention by choosing to intervene on Hermione's behalf, a choice she couldn't bring herself to _wholly_ regret, and now she would have to expend time to dealing with the consequences. The sooner she acted, the less time managing him would require.

She could cut him off from his peers, beginning with the youngest, before he even realized he was losing them. Some of the groundwork had been laid with the study group; Astoria had stayed despite her discomfort and students from the other houses now had an impression of Malfoy as a liar.

There was another line of attack open to her, one that meshed with the thoughts she'd had about money the day before. Draco's power at school, petty as it was, existed because his father was an influential figure in wizarding politics. It followed that if his father were less influential, he would command less respect among his classmates.

She wrote three letters in three different styles of handwriting. One invited its recipient to tea on Thursday, one declared that the family wasn't interested in selling after all, and the last one simply said "_I'm watching_." in red ink.

Satisfied, she dispatched them via different but equally unmemorable owls.

She would do nothing drastic, nothing overt. She could nudge things here and there without taking up too much time, engineer a series of coincidences—a bit of good luck for a rival, a member of his network distracted at a key time, an occasional petty quarrel—that would gradually and unnoticeably erode his power base. By the time his heir came of age, Malfoy's would be one name among many.

In the meantime, she could just use her power to evade any run-ins.

She concluded her business in the owlery by dispatching letters to each of the thirteen people her power had identified as having recovered their memories post-Obliviation. There was no reason for her to do everything herself on that front; as they replied one by one over the next two or three weeks, she'd put them in touch with each other so they could compare notes. Perhaps their discussion would produce something she could use.

While she was waiting for those results, she'd pursue another avenue. Once Fortuna had unpacked her bookbag back in her dorm room, she ran a hand across the cover of the leatherbound notebook she'd acquired from the oblivious Professor Binns.

Hermione had hinted that the dreams she was having might include memories. She evidently couldn't use her power to access them, but that didn't mean she was helpless. Memories or not, she was going to record the fragments she could remember every morning and piece together whatever might be kicking around in the recesses of her mind.

There was only one way she was getting some answers to her questions and that was to investigate.


	9. Chapter 9: Nothing to Fear

Alexander thumped his tail on the ground when Fortuna pushed open the door to the Shrieking Shack. He wasn't a very lively or demonstrative dog, but he'd learned their presence meant food and had taken to waiting for them every evening.

"It's undignified," she said, stepping out of the way and around the dog so Flavia could follow her in.

Flavia cast the spell that lit the torches on the first floor, then resumed their conversation. "More undignified than loitering outside the portrait waiting for someone else to say two words?" she asked. "Just how long did you plan on standing in the corridor?"

Fortuna set her bag down on the table, which she'd repaired a few days ago and spruced up—as in, turned into spruce—using transfiguration. "Precisely as long as I did," she said, and started unpacking their supplies.

"And what if I hadn't been the one to find you? Anyone else would have thought you were stupid enough to forget a password with your name in it, which is surely less dignified than having your name in the password to begin with."

"Perhaps I simply wished to see you and knew you'd be along presently."

"If a girl says 'fortuna major' in an empty corridor and nobody hears her, does she still lose face?"

"I would hear it," Fortuna said. "And the Fat Lady would hear it. And it would be undignified."

"You said that about nicknaming Harbinger," Flavia said. "While he was licking his arse on your bed."

"Cleanliness is dignified," Fortuna countered. "Harbinger is a fastidious young man who deserves respect."

"You let him lick your hand less than two minutes later," Flavia said as she extended her own hand for Alexander's inspection.

Having neither a ready comeback nor a willingness to use her power to generate one, Fortuna busied herself with presenting an entire cottage pie to their dog. It was one of three she'd brought for the evening, and she anticipated getting to eat a quarter of one.

_He _was clean now, too, thanks to the combined efforts of herself, Flavia, and a very large bucket of soapy water. He'd submitted to the bath but had fled when Flavia had broken out a comb, which put him well below Harbinger's standards of grooming. Nonetheless, Fortuna was pleased with the improvement.

"It could be worse," Flavia said. "It could be 'fortuna _minor_.'"

Fortuna sniffed. "It could also be anything else. Such as 'The Word Flavia Means Blonde but Flavia de Luce Isn't Blonde.'"

"And you don't think you're major?"

"It doesn't make any _sense_," Fortuna said, finally giving vent to a week and a half of pent-up annoyance. "'Major' means 'bigger.' A bigger fortune? Why is that a password? Unless fortuna is in the ablative, in which case it would be 'bigger _than _fortuna.' But that's just..."

Flavia burst out laughing and Fortuna stopped talking. It dawned on her that she was being _ribbed_. This was also undignified, but she didn't counterattack.

Her friend's laughter eventually subsided and she caught her breath. "I think you should enjoy it while it lasts, which shouldn't be too long. View it as a title. Revel in the fact that every Gryffindor must acknowledge your greatness if they wish to enter your domain."

"I don't need a title."

"You said that about His Majesty," Flavia said. "And you were wrong."

The two of them considered Alexander. He was looking up at them, panting a little. His eyes were bright and his head cocked to one side, and—unusually for him—he wasn't eating.

Flavia reached down to scritch between his eyes. "I think we need to vary King George's diet," she said thoughtfully. "He hasn't touched his pie."

"Perhaps he's feeling ill from eating our entire case of chocolate frogs last night. I'm surprised he isn't dead."

"He's a wizard dog," Flavia returned. "The chocolate is probably normal for his breed."

"His breed," said Fortuna, who hadn't forgiven the loss of the frogs, "is mutt."

And with that, they went upstairs to their potions lab and got to work.

They had transformed the Shrieking Shack from a run-down wreck to a homely haven—or at least a haven that Fortuna's power thought was homely—since their first journey. Dust and debris had been swept from the hardwood floor and the tattered remains of decades old wallpaper had been removed and replaced with wood paneling and tapestries.

They'd redone the bedroom using sheets unwittingly donated by Romilda Vane and easy chairs snuck out from an empty classroom with levitating charms. What little space left had been claimed by Alexander's bed—a gratuitously large and abrasively green pillow taken from a Slytherin upperclassman who may, or may not, have been related to Flavia—and the potions lab.

The lab had started to gain the sheen of a mad scientist's lair, which was the aesthetic Fortuna suspected Flavia was going for in spite of her vehement denials. She _could _have neatly organized things as Fortuna could have transfigured any storage container she desired, but instead everything was in full display. Vials full of multicolored solutions lined layers of shelves and vine-like strings of chemical tubing wound all over the desk and between flasks. Perpetually chilling reflux condensers, magically powered rotary evaporators, and painfully normal erlenmeyer flasks stood at the ready.

It was the best setup Fortuna could provide with the resources of Hogwarts at her power's disposal, and Flavia could not have been happier with it. She surveyed the largess and connected the thought back to one of the items on her agenda. "Do you think Professor Snape's been angry lately because he lost so many ingredients?" she asked, knowing what Flavia's reaction would be.

"_Severus Snape_," Flavia spat, slamming a library book down on her tabletop more harshly than it deserved, "does not belong in the position of Potions Professor at Hogwarts. He doesn't deserve the _privilege _of _looking_ at the parchment upon which my essays are written, let alone _reading _the words I have set down thereon. The _insolent _assumption he is qualified to assign them numerical value is _not _to be borne. Why that _presumptuous_ cretin is allowed to teach at _this_ school is so far beyond what I could imagine that, that—" She broke off, trying to find a way to vocalize her the full extent of her disdain.

Alexander, who had occupied the pillow and was watching them, growled.

"Clever boy," Flavia said to Alexander, and gave him a sugar mouse. Then she resumed her ranting. "He has done _nothing _but ruin potions for an entire generation of witches and wizards. How many students have given up on the field or decided to forego their dreams to avoid his classes? How many undeserving pupils have passed on due to his favoritism? He has pushed back the very forces of magical and scientific progress. It's gross negligence and I would be better off teaching that class myself than to continue going to it."

"You _are _teaching that class yourself," Fortuna said. "And you've done well so far."

In fact, everyone had done well over the past week. In Tuesday's Charms class, Angelique had drawn Professor Flitwick's praise by correctly casting a spell on her first try. Professor Flitwick, overjoyed at a new student pulling off an incantation so quickly, had asked her how she had managed to overcome the ineptitude she'd shown in her first week—not in so many words, of course. Angelique had excitedly described the study group.

The Professor awarded ten points to Hufflepuff for good spellmanship and teamwork, and this had inspired other students to join. Their Wednesday meeting included twelve people, and Fortuna knew that two other groups had started since then. Competition was now inevitable, and that competition would drive overall improvement. Fortuna Floris would soon be one bright student among many.

Her _other _problem had been resolved as well. On Thursday, Astoria's mother had traveled to Malfoy Manor in response to an invitation to tea from Narcissa Malfoy. Narcissa Malfoy had sent no such invitation and did not take well to her afternoon being disrupted. They muddled through, but the incident had left both women feeling angry and humiliated.

On Friday, both Mrs. Malfoy and Mrs. Greengrass had owled their children asking for any insight into the fiasco they might provide, and by Saturday, Astoria had stopped viewing the study group as an opportunity to spy on others of her year in order to gain standing with Draco Malfoy. Without her poking and prodding, Fortuna would be able to fade into the background in the coming weeks.

She just had to solidify Flavia's enrollment. The study group had grown on her over the past week, especially once Snape had offended her, but she still doubted that she was going to get anything out of the time she devoted to it. It would take her a few months to fully appreciate how much she could enjoy helping others.

So Fortuna continued to press the point. She started to tick off the members of the study group on her fingers. "The 91 you got was the highest grade in our class. I got an 87, Candidus got an 84, the Hufflepuffs got 80s and 81s."

"And Coleman and Greengrass got 86s despite having the same quality essay as the Hufflepuffs. House bias at work."

"True. But you said it yourself. The point isn't the grades, it's that you're getting people to learn and _understand_."

Not one to be deterred from a righteous rage, Flavia ignored this. "And _none_ of those answers on _any _of our essays were wrong and he knows it. Marking me down was retaliation. He was just looking for an excuse to get back at me for proving one of his points wrong in class."

"I don't think that what you said matters to him. I think the fact you're a Gryffindor does. And he's in a bad mood because he lost his ingredients and probably blames Gryffindors, even if he doesn't know _which _Gryffindors are behind it."

Flavia huffed, then turned back to her book. "We should steal more, then."

"We will."

Flavia accepted this point with a begrudging grumble and turned back to her book. "There's a new moon on Thursday," she said, while flipping through the pages. "We'll have to brew the Veritaserum then, but we can crush moonstone and prepare some of the other ingredients tonight."

"Veritaserum?" Fortuna asked, because she wasn't supposed to know the answer.

"A potion that encourages people to tell the truth. It's not foolproof, but the ability to resist it is rare. We'll dangle Harry Potter as bait, ambush Black, and get him to spill his guts.

"How do we dangle someone else?"

"Well, I don't suppose _we _have to," Flavia said. "Black knowing he's at Hogwarts will do, and he should know that. If he was still able to escape Azkaban after twelve years of Dementors, he should still be able to do basic arithmetic."

Something occurred to her and she turned her power off before asking the question. "Why," she said slowly, "did he not immediately escape Azkaban?"

The question gave Flavia pause. "You're right," she said. "If he had been able to do it when he arrived there, he would have done it then instead of waiting twelve years with dementors."

"Something must have changed this summer. Someone from the outside made contact and helped him."

"Perhaps," Flavia said. "Or perhaps he completed something big while inside. It may have taken him some time, but it could be possible. After all, Joseph Gay-Lussac spent nearly a decade formulating Charles's Law, despite deducing the principles behind it seven years earlier."

The idea of a prisoner deducing some hidden secret about the inner workings of Azkaban or inventing some kind of wandless magic after twelve years around the Dementors seemed ludicrous, even taking Flavia's metaphor into account. No, a person on the outside with connections could more easily have gotten him out.

She decided to allow herself a test.

_If I had to help a prisoner escape from Azkaban, how would I do it?_

Her mind practically exploded with possibilities. Human guards could be bribed, dementors could be distracted, walls could be broken through, people could be disappeared.

_If I were a wandless prisoner who'd spent twelve years in Azkaban and didn't have my power, how would I escape by myself?_

No options. Telling.

"It seems more likely that someone from You-Know-Who's side of the war helped him out," she ventured.

"Like Lucius Malfoy?" Flavia snorted. "He hasn't got the guts."

Alexander wheezed and Fortuna checked him over to make sure he wasn't actually dying from excess of chocolate frog, even if he did deserve to.

"I overheard my father talking about the war one night, and he thinks people like Malfoy want people like Black to _stay _in prison because that's where people like Malfoy belong and people like Black know that people like Malfoy aren't in there with them."

Fortuna took a moment to think that sentence through.

"What's important is that he's out now and that we focus on getting the jump on him when he does arrive. I was kidnapped before the school year started and I do _not_ intend on having it happen again. We will need to—"

"You were _what_," Fortuna interrupted.

"Oh," Flavia said, a little flummoxed. "I didn't explain that, did I?"

"You did not."

"Well one morning I found a body in our cucumbers," she said with glee in her eyes. "It was an old school friend of my father's."

Flavia's desire for her to ask more was about as subtle as a secondary schoolboy's crush, but Fortuna was happy to let her brag.

"I assume you got yourself involved immediately," Fortuna said.

"Of course! The police force was completely baffled. I spent days tracking back through the man's belongings, digging through newspaper archives, speaking with my father's old associates, and finally uncovering the truth of the matter."

She preened a little.

"Kidnapping," Fortuna said, pointedly.

"Oh, the killer realized I figured out what he'd done before I could get away. He tied me up and threw me in a cellar, for all the good it did him. Dogger came along and clocked him one good. Drove Harriet's car right through the library wall. It's quite a long story."

"I'd be interested in hearing it sometime," Fortuna said. "Sometime _before_ we evaluate your ideas on how to trap Sirius Black."

"Yes, well, I was caught unaware then, but be sure that this time I will not be so flat-footed. I think we should research intruder detection charms in the library tomorrow. I'm mostly worried about Black showing up before next month, when the Veritaserum will be done."

Fortuna held herself back from any questions on the potion. Flavia's normal exuberance had faded after talk of the kidnapping, leaving quiet contemplation. She had been speaking as if she was barely paying attention to what came out of her mouth.

She let the silence that followed to linger before asking, "Is there something wrong?"

"Not really. The murder was hectic—they arrested Father at first—and a lot of things came out. I found out that the financial situation my family currently finds itself in is less than favourable. There is a chance that we will have to sell Buckshaw, our home."

_No, there isn't_, Fortuna decided.

"It would be nice to solve a mystery without any shattering revelations. At least here we know who did it and why, and all we have to do is catch him and shake him down to find out everything about his friends."

Fortuna let the silence hang, but she could feel the expectation that Flavia's confidences be repaid.

"I spent the past three and a half years in a foster home with six other children at any given time," she said. "I hardly remember anything from before that."

Flavia shifted. Fortuna asked herself why, and saw that Flavia had just understood why she'd asked about memory potions that first day.

"I only just remembered losing my parents because of the dementor on the train. So I understand the pain of shattering revelations."

Flavia reached out to put a hand on Fortuna's shoulder. She let her do it. "Is that what the book is for?" she asked. "Remembering things?"

"Yes," Fortuna admitted. Of course Flavia had noticed Fortuna writing in the journal every morning, but she hadn't commented on it until now. "But it's not working."

Even primed to use her power to write the moment she woke up, her dreams slipped away from her. There were snatches of things that slipped away faster the harder she tried to them down. What she had been able to gather over several nights was an impression of sterile white hallways, and there wasn't much she could do with that.

"I think I must have been in a hospital after my parents died, but I don't _know_. No hospital—I mean, no hospital I know about—has any record of me. There's a part of me lost in the past, and it's somewhere I can't reach."

Flavia was quiet for a while longer. Then she said, "I know what you mean. People act like I'm Harriet, my mother. But the only parts of her left are in a locked room, sitting to rot or be taken away, or—or sold off. We don't even have a body."

Alexander whined and put his head in Flavia's lap. She scratched away at his ears. "I often wonder what it would have been like," she said. "If that hadn't happened."

What would she have been if her parents hadn't been killed? Where would she be? Would her family have been happy with her? Would she be with Flavia now, going to Hogwarts?

"So do I," she said.

Professor Lupin paced in front of the classroom as the last of his first year Gryffindors and Slytherins trickled in. Fortuna had quickly grown to respect him despite his inexperience. He was a competent man who wanted to teach and, if the stories from upperclassmen were to be believed, those were two crucial traits that had been missing from the Defense Against the Dark Arts position for some time.

He immediately began to speak once they'd taken their seats. "As I said on the first day, this will not be a class like Charms or Transfiguration. You will not be learning spells and judged on that, though you will learn spells. You will be judged on _how _you use the spells. Can you identify the creature you come across and apply the right spell in time?"

He directed the class's attention to a large cabinet in the front of the room.

"The faculty and I have been collecting boggarts for students to practice on, and we have trapped one here. Can anyone tell us what a boggart is? Yes, Mr. Goggin?"

A brawny Slytherin put his hand down. "Sir, a boggart is a monster that turns into whatever you think is scariest."

"Quite right. One point to Slytherin. The spell to banish it is simple, but you have to think of a way to make what you fear humorous."

He walked them through the incantation and wand movements and gave them a few minutes to think about their fear and how they'd face it. Chairs scraped and shoes pounded as the student body got situated in a crude half-circle, whispering amongst themselves. Jessica left her fellow Slytherins to come bother Flavia and Fortuna.

"Whaddya expect to get?" she asked.

"I imagine it will be Ophelia coming to pinch my cheeks and call me cute pet names," Flavia answered. "There's nothing more terrifying than Feely when she is pretending to be friendly. How about yourself?"

"Probably that study group," Jessica lied. "Nothing more frightening than being stuck reading books with you lot forever. What about—"

"Miss Floris, would you like to be our first attempt?" Lupin asked with a smile.

Fortuna did not, in fact, want to be the first one to try, but refusing a direct request from a professor would be more noticeable than going first. She walked to the center of the circle, conscious of her classmates' eyes boring into her back.

This was hard for her. What did she have to fear? Boredom? Someone discovering the nature of her abilities?

No. Too abstract for a monster in a cabinet that turned into spiders and mummies for a living. She asked herself and saw the fog.

Which made sense. The Dementor had cracked open some container inside of her and the fog had spilled out. It was the only thing she'd found yet that completely blocked her ability to see using her power. Her biggest weakness and the obstruction to every question she had about herself. The unknown, after all, was far more frightening than any movie monster.

The boggart would seize on that, and she could turn it into a shower of glitter. Everybody would be too preoccupied picking it out of their hair and rubbing it out of their eyes to wonder why she was afraid of clouds.

The door creaked open.

Her power was prepped to cast the spell—three steps. Visualize glitter, swish her wand, shout a word.

But the boggart took its time.

The first thing that came out was a black leather shoe polished to mirror brightness.

Fortuna mentally faltered.

A pale hand wrapped itself around the edge of the door and pushed it open, revealing the woman within. She stepped out, rising to her full height. Her hands went to smooth nonexistent creases out of her sharp black slacks and the tailored black jacket she wore over a starched white button-up shirt, then up to adjust a slim black tie secured with the same even knot Fortuna used.

_I want to know who that is._

But fog swept across her foresight, cutting her off from her power. All she could do was stare.

She recognized the face that stared back. It was her mother's face, pretty and neatly framed by dark, not quite curly hair—but hard-edged and implacable, stripped of kindness, warmth, everything that had made her _Mama_.Seeing that face like this was somehow more chilling, more unbearable than watching it dissolve in acid.

The woman surveyed the classroom with her dark eyes, dispassionately taking the measure of each of her classmates and the professor. She seemed to conclude that they were all irrelevant, and finally turned the full force of her gaze onto Fortuna.

"Hello, Fortuna," said the woman in the suit. "If it's all the same to you, I'd like my body back."


	10. Chapter 10: The Bogeyman

There were distant alarm bells ringing in her head, and she couldn't bring herself to move, but Fortuna didn't _feel_ scared. Her mind couldn't quite wrap itself around what she was seeing.

She asked her power for help. Only fog responded.

Professor Lupin peeked out from his position on the other side of the armoire. He was whispering frantically about laughter, but Fortuna decided to ignore his instructions in the pursuit of answers.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"The future," the woman in the suit said. "The future you will inevitably accept, and the future you will regret postponing."

The future? She'd assumed the boggart had taken the form of her mother, but her mother was dead. There was no future left for her.

"I'm curious." The woman stepped forward casually, her hands behind her back. "Both about why you are trying to hide from me, and why you think you can. Are you a coward, or are you merely selfish?"

Fortuna recognized the slight tilt of the head when stating a fact, the pause between sentences as though gathering thoughts, and the level stare while making sure the point was delivered in full. They were all tics. Her own tics.

Not her mother.

_Me_.

The fear set in. It started with her wand hand, steadily paralyzing her, spreading like a fungus up her arm and through her chest until it lodged itself in her brain.

The woman drew a little knife, identical to the one Fortuna had in her back pocket, and idly began to clean her fingernails. "Observe the facts. You know what you are, and you know what _they _are to you. You can't be here under anything other than false pretenses. What are you playing at?"

Out of the corner of her eye, Fortuna saw Professor Lupin approach.

The woman in the suit turned her head to look at him. "Werewolf."

He stopped dead in his tracks. The class looked confused, but Fortuna understood. The woman was showing off what she could do with the power she wielded—how easily she could expose any secret, destroy any life.

The power _Fortuna_ wielded.

She turned back to Fortuna, advancing on her at a slow, calculated pace. "Your family would be appalled by your shameless egotism. Yet you eschew your responsibilities in favor of playing pretend with dolls." She leaned in. "What makes you think you deserve to squander such potential on yourself, you selfish, self-indulgent _child_?"

Resentment welled up from deep within Fortuna, its intensity taking her by surprise. She squeezed her eyes shut. _It's not fair. I never asked for this. Leave me alone._

She raised her wand, then. Her voice shook. "_Riddikulus_."

The woman remained standing, unchanged and unfazed. "The only acceptable reason to abdicate your duties was to turn yourself over to the ones you wronged. Yet you chose to run rather than face your crimes. Your victims. Your failures."

She threw the knife. The blade embedded itself in the floor at Fortuna's feet.

Fortuna looked down at the black handle sticking up between her shoes. Her vision blurred.

"You will continue to fail," the woman said. "Again and again. You will eventually realize that your inaction is evil, and you will feel nothing but shame when you finally yield. No matter how long or how far you run, your path will take you to nothing but me."

A hand grabbed her shoulder and threw her out of the way, where she fell heavily onto her wrist. A bolt of white-hot pain shot up her arm from where her hand had cracked onto the floor. Fortuna clutched at it and looked up.

Flavia stood facing the boggart, which had started to morph from the woman in the suit into an older man. If his face was anything to go by, the passage of years had worn him down like sandpaper.

"I'm sorry you had to find out this way, but the truth must come out." The man shook his head. "You aren't my daughter. You never were. We found the true Flavia and will be sending you off soon, back to where you belong. Your sisters will be so pleased—"

"_Riddikulus_," Flavia said, not even hesitating.

The man abruptly straightened. He took a compact out of his pocket and opened it. Examining himself in the little mirror, he started speaking in the shrill falsetto of Ophelia de Luce.

"Oh, the things boys do to catch the eye of a beautiful girl," he said, fluttering his eyelashes. "I do so _love _getting stale chocolates from Ned Cropper. It makes me feel like I'm the tastiest pie at the whole church potluck."

Everyone laughed, and the boggart recoiled.

"Wonderful work, Miss de Luce! Miss Coleman, would you take the floor?"

As Jessica stepped forward, Professor Lupin hurried over to Fortuna. He stooped beside her and murmured, "Miss Floris, are you all right?"

Fortuna didn't respond. She noticed she was crying, and wiped her cheeks with the back of her unhurt hand. Professor Lupin carefully tugged her other arm away from her chest to check her wrist.

Behind him, the boggart morphed into a tall, sneering woman who began to berate Jessica for failing out of Hogwarts.

"It looks like you may have sprained your wrist. You should go—"

"I'll take her to Madam Pomfrey," Flavia butted in, before the professor could even think of sending Fortuna alone.

"Don't you worry, darling." A lilting voice floated out from behind the professor. "It's no burden at all to have to feed and clothe you until you're eighteen. We knew you'd never survive at that school anyway. Did you really believe you were going to make it with those posh children?"

Professor Lupin glanced over his shoulder at the boggart, then turned back and smiled. Not an ounce of tension left his face. "Thank you, Miss de Luce. That's very kind.

Jessica jabbed her wand at the boggart. "_Riddikulus_."

The woman twisted, contorting into a giant frog that was still wearing the same tacky clothing as before. She opened her mouth to continue her assault, but all that came out was a loud _ribbit_. Every time she croaked, she got smaller.

As peals of laughter rang out, Flavia helped Fortuna to her feet and began steering her towards the door.

Professor Lupin addressed the class. "Now, is there anyone here who _isn't_ going to see their parents?"

Flavia took Fortuna along the hallways at a slower than necessary walk, gently holding the other girl's hand. It took only a few corridors before the guiding pull became an annoying tug at Fortuna's sense of worth.

"My _brain_ wasn't injured," Fortuna said, removing her hand from Flavia's grasp. "I don't need to be led around like a dog."

Flavia studied her, not quite believing that. "Are you all right?"

Fortuna thought for a moment. She decided that the blunt truth was the best way to do this. "No," she said, "I am not, and your throwing skills leave much to be desired."

"_I _think your falling skills are what's lacking," Flavia snapped. She'd been expecting gratitude and was stung by the criticism.

Rage flared inside her, at Flavia's arrogance, her presumption. In an instant she saw every single one of the other girl's flaws and insecurities as plainly as she could see her face. She saw just how _trivial_ it would be to wedge a knife into each faultline and shatter her beyond repair.

_Playing pretend with dolls_.

The anger left as quickly as it came, leaving only shame. Fortuna took a deep breath. Other people were usually innocent, and she had to control herself even when they weren't.

"Thank you," she said evenly. "I'm glad you stepped in."

"Does it really hurt that much?" Flavia looked down at her wrist with sympathy.

Did it? Fortuna couldn't say. She didn't _get _hurt. She wasn't clumsy, never accidentally bit her tongue or stubbed her toe or walked into a doorframe. She didn't eat anything that would make her sick or get headaches. This was a new experience, one she had herself to blame for.

"_Fuck_," she said.

Flavia winced. "I really am sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have thrown you, but I was worried. Seeing your mother like that must have been—"

Fortuna whipped around with such speed that she jarred her wrist. "That was _not_ my mother."

"No, of course it wasn't," Flavia said, placating her. "But I thought you needed help and I was the only one who could give it. Dogger, our gardener, gets the same way. Everyone else looked like they were going to stand around gawking until the woman had her hands around your throat."

The other students. What were they thinking about her?

Nothing much, she was relieved to learn. It turned out that a majority had deep-seated familial issues, and they assumed that Fortuna was being taken to task by a relative. In fact, only Flavia was mulling over the scene in depth. She should have just let her think it was her mother.

Some of her classmates did think a little less of a Gryffindor who was unable to face a fear, but she had to admit that their judgment was fair. She hadn't reacted well, or at all. Because the _fucking_ fog had shown up again.

Fortuna pushed open the doors to the medical bay and was halfway to Pomfrey's office before the woman poked her head out to see who was there.

"Back so soon?" Madam Pomfrey asked. "I hope this wasn't the Dementors again."

"I was injured in Defense Against the Dark Arts. Broken wrist," Fortuna said, offering her arm for examination.

The nurse _tsk_ed and led Fortuna to a bed for examination, with Flavia following closely behind.

Madam Pomfrey tilted Fortuna's arm this way and that, then cast a spell. "Scaphoid fracture," she announced. "Nothing a drop of Knight's Bone-Knitting Brew can't take care of. Wait here."

She departed in a hurry, leaving the two alone with each other. Flavia shot furtive glances towards Fortuna. Her power informed her that the other girl was planning the best way to start a conversation about what she had seen in Defense class.

Fortuna decided to cut that off before it got started. "I need some time to think," she said, shooting a power-crafted pleading glance at her friend.

Flavia didn't argue. "I understand," she said. She stepped out the door. "I need to be alone to do my best thinking as well. See you later."

The wait wasn't long before Madam Pomfrey was already hurrying back over to with a potion in each hand. "Did your friend already leave?"

Fortuna nodded.

"It looks like your recovery will take longer than usual," the nurse said. "Someone snuck into our potions room recently and stole some of my ingredients. The shipments on some have been a bit delayed, so we will have to go with a different, longer cure."

She placed two potions on the bedside table, one deep green and the other a vibrant magenta.

"Drink both as soon as you can. I would like you to stay here for the night, at least until it has taken effect. I'd like to get a look in the morning, just to be sure nothing unusual pops up."

Fortuna didn't argue. She wasn't interested in seeing anyone else today, and there wouldn't be another injury at Hogwarts until tomorrow morning when a second year in Hufflepuff would get burns on a third of his body in potions. Snape's fault.

Madam Pomfrey asked a few questions, but Fortuna deflected and distracted her until she returned to her office. She wouldn't bother her from here on out.

She drew the curtains. Then she downed the green potion, which would fix her wrist. The taste was more bitter than anything she'd ever had before and it went down like oil, but she managed to choke it down. Soon all that was left was an unpleasant aftertaste.

Fortuna held off on taking the magenta sleeping potion. Instead she lay down on her side and stared at the inside of the off-white clinical curtains surrounding her bed.

She felt nauseated. She'd never seriously considered using her power on the scale the boggart had implied, and now that she tried to dwell on it, she found it unthinkable. It took effort to focus, like she was deliberately forcing herself to hold her palm to a hot stovetop.

What failures had her other self talked about? Letting her parents die? Were there _more_ crimes, maybe even worse ones behind the veil of fog? Was the fog there to shield her from that knowledge?

She turned her attention to the rest of the accusations the boggart had laid at her feet. That she was shirking her duties and simply play-acting, using others as props to amuse herself.

It was true she could assert immense power over anyone else—_everyone_ else. Breaking, controlling, and molding people would be as easy as everything else she did, but she wasn't interested in doing any of that. Did the simple fact that potential existed mean she should live by herself without ever interacting with anyone? Or did it mean that she should be using it to change the world for the benefit of humankind, whatever it cost herself?

_You selfish, self-indulgent child._

She knew how others would use her power if they had it—specifically, they _would _use it—and she knew that was why it was good that she had it and they did not.

Wherever her power had come from, it was a one-off fluke, an anomaly that needn't be revealed or applied on a large scale. It didn't define her and it would not determine her path. She was Fortuna. That was all she should and would be. Not a tool. Never a tool.

_No matter how long or how far you run, your path will take you to nothing but me._

Thinking about those words made her feel something else. A dread, mixed with the weight of inevitability. As though that woman had cursed her, doomed her.

If she started using her power like that, where would it end? She could see that road open up before her, and she saw what spending her life subordinate to the needs of others and dictates of her power would lead to. Emptiness, sadness, isolation.

The thought made her want to vomit, and she knew it wasn't the potion at work. She reached for the sleeping draught.

* * *

When Fortuna woke up, there was a wand in her ear.

Without moving her head, she looked to her side. The only source of light was a sliver of a crescent moon, but the night was cloudless and the hospital wing's curtains were pulled back. She could clearly see Flavia standing on the other end of the wand.

"Why," Fortuna said.

"Practice," Flavia replied briskly, withdrawing the wand but otherwise not reacting to having been caught. "I need to be able to deduce what potions my subjects have recently ingested simply from observation."

She rubbed her ear. "And what have you deduced from prodding my eardrum?"

"Nothing," she admitted. "I know that you must have taken either Knight's Bone-Knitting Brew or Lickety Splint simply because that's what I left in the cupboard and the other potions that would cure a broken wrist take more than twelve days to brew, but I can't tell which. And you took a sleeping potion, but I only know that because I've been in and out since dinner and you just woke up."

Fortuna checked the time with her power. It was half-past one. "I woke up because you stuck a wand in my ear."

"Which was it? I think it must have been the Bone-Knitting Brew due to residual heat in your wrist, but it's been too long to say for sure."

"Lickety Splint," Fortuna said, untruthfully and a little sourly.

Flavia wasn't fooled. She preened for a moment. Then she scooped up a pillow from another bed and tossed it to Fortuna. "Move."

Fortuna shuffled to the side, giving her room.

Once she had settled in, Flavia sighed. "My methodology needs refining," she said. "I need more test subjects, and I don't suppose Madam Pomfrey would volunteer her patients. Vexatious."

"If you intend to gather them by breaking their bones and then sneaking up on them in their sleep, I doubt you will get many volunteers."

Flavia began to outline alternative strategies for ensnaring sick wizards, but she hadn't _really _come to the hospital wing to practice or talk about potions diagnostics, so she tapered off. Her silence left a vacuum that she expected Fortuna to fill.

It was very well-done, Fortuna had to admit. Everything about this conversation was calculated. She'd allowed time to pass, tested Fortuna's mood, allowed her to feel comfortable, and then given her an opening to talk. Silence was an interrogation technique she'd picked up from a detective in her village, and she was self-consciously employing for the first time.

Even knowing the setup, Fortuna felt herself respond to that expectation. "Do you think that you should do something just because you can?"

Flavia huddled closer. "What do you mean?"

"Say…" Fortuna paused, letting her power assemble the explanation. "Say you could be the best Seeker that ever was and ever would be. You would always find the Snitch, no matter how fast it was or where it went, and you would always find it first. You would never lose track of it and you would never lose a game. Nobody could beat you. Your team would always win just because you showed up and got on a broom. Would you do it, just because you could?"

"That would get boring," Flavia said. "For you and everybody who watches Quidditch."

"Raise the stakes." Fortuna sat up. "The potion I took. There are fourteen more in that room. Should we steal them, get on a broom, and deliver them to fourteen Muggles with broken bones?"

"The Statute of Secrecy—"

"Memory charms," Fortuna said with a dismissive flick of her uninjured wrist. "Or just trick them into drinking alcohol. The law isn't an obstacle to helping, just an excuse for not."

Flavia frowned.

"There are billions of Muggles. There are a few million of us. Why should only a few people get to be so lucky? Shouldn't we stop everything we are doing and help them?"

Flavia was silent for a long while as two contradictory sets of cultural conditioning went to war with each other: mandated secrecy versus thirty-four generations of noblesse oblige. Of course people who could be helped for their own good should be helped for their own good, but there were good reasons to follow the dictates and norms of Wizarding society. The struggle finally resolved into a determination to acquire more information—_clues_, as she was thinking of Fortuna's statements.

"What is it," she said at last, "that you think you can do?"

"Take over the world and enslave the wizarding population for everyone's good."

Flavia stared at her. Fortuna waited.

"You're afraid you'll become the next Dark Lord," Flavia said. Awe tinged her voice. "You're _actually_ afraid of it. More than anything."

Of course Flavia didn't believe she could do any such thing, but she admired the scale on which Fortuna thought about operating and the strength of her conviction, and accordingly revised her estimation of Fortuna upwards several notches.

"Are you saying I can't?" Fortuna asked, flat.

She could _hear_ the gears turning in Flavia's head as she reevaluated her companion in light of the day's events. They ground through a mental catalogue of conversations and observations, and came to rest on the decision to solve Fortuna like a murder.

Flavia decided to play it off as a joke, concealing the conclusion that she'd reached. "I'd never doubt your capabilities," she said. "I'm not saying you couldn't, I'm saying you _shouldn't_. Where would I fit in? I don't think I would make a good second-in-command."

"I could take over the world and enslave the wizarding population for everyone's good _in your name_," Fortuna offered. "Flavia Regina Ingeniosa."

"Queen Flavia the Brilliant," Flavia said, testing the sound of the title in her mouth. She couldn't quite suppress an excited wriggle. "I like it."

"I'll bear your preferences in mind."

"Thank you," Flavia said solemnly. She unhinged her jaw in a yawn so exaggerated it would have rung false even if Fortuna hadn't been using her power. "You," she finished, injecting a palpably exhausted note into her voice, "shall be my grand vizier."

And with that, Flavia pretended to fall asleep. She rolled over, taking the blanket with her on the assumption that leaving Fortuna with only a quarter of a blanket would sell her lie better. After all, would anybody awake deliberately strip someone else of warmth and coziness? Of course not; she _must _be unconscious.

Fortuna played along. She tucked the remaining sliver of hogged blanket around Flavia and slipped out of bed to grab another, just as she would have done if her bunkmate had actually been sleeping.


	11. Chapter 11: A Sirius Situation

As Fortuna rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, she got her bearings. It was nearly four, still two hours before curfew ended, and a man—Professor Lupin—was shaking her, demanding she wake up.

His words came out in sharp bursts and gasps. Obviously winded, he looked even more out of sorts than usual.

"Miss Floris! Glad you're safe. Is Miss de Luce in here with you? We've searched everywhere and—"

Flavia, who had been deep asleep and did not have a superpower to orient herself, muzzily emerged from her cocoon of stolen blankets and gaped.

"There you are," he wheezed, massaging his chest. He clearly needed to run laps around the castle more often. He turned to a red-headed boy who was standing slightly behind him. "Mr. Weasley, can you tell Minerva that Miss de Luce is safe in the hospital wing?"

"Yes, sir," the boy said, and ran back out the door. The professor turned back to the two of them.

"Safe?" Flavia asked. Then her eyes sharpened. "From what?"

Fortuna had a suspicion and didn't ask her power.

Professor Lupin grimaced. "There was a break-in at Gryffindor Tower. We took roll call and when you weren't anywhere to be found, I remembered that your friend was staying the night here."

"A break-in? Why? Who?"

Professor Lupin's face darkened. "Sirius Black."

The jolt of excitement that shot through Flavia at that announcement was palpable. She didn't quite manage to tamp it down before their professor noticed.

"Which," he said, speaking rapidly so as to preempt whatever Flavia was about to say, "Is precisely why you cannot be out past curfew. It is dangerous."

A pause, as Flavia considered her options. "I'm sorry, sir," she said in a small, pathetic voice, drooping her head and looking like penitence itself. "I was worried about Fortuna—"

Fortuna made her decision. "The boggart scared me," she interjected.

"And I just couldn't help but go looking for her," Flavia continued.

"I asked her to stay. I didn't want to be alone."

"I didn't mean to cause any trouble."

"I didn't think anyone would notice she was missing. Please, sir, it's my fault."

They were laying it on a bit thick, and Professor Lupin was only partially mollified. "I won't take house points away," he said. "But rules exist for a reason. You, Miss de Luce, could have been seriously hurt—or worse. And you, Miss Floris, should not have encouraged her. Detention for the both of you."

Flavia let out a sharp little huff, but didn't argue, and Fortuna accepted his judgment. She hadn't wanted this at all, but the alternative had been abandoning Flavia.

"There's something else I need to tell you, Miss Floris. Miss de Luce, if you would please return to your house? The head girl has been kind enough to agree to walk you back."

Head girl? Fortuna blinked, then looked behind Professor Lupin. A girl—woman—had been standing in the room this entire time, quiet and still enough to escape all notice by its bleary-eyed occupants.

She was beautiful, and she clearly knew it and she just as clearly cultivated it. Nobody, not even the sort of woman crowned queen by adoring masses and carried around on golden pedestals for all to bow before, woke up in the dead of night and looked that presentable. She'd obviously put effort into selecting her robes and arranging her hair, even at three in the morning during an emergency.

Ophelia de Luce ran a pale hand through her long hair and tucked a curl behind her ear, before responding. "Of course, Professor. I would like the opportunity to speak with my sister anyway."

Flavia tensed up like a frightened porcupine, but there was no room for escape. She wormed her way out of the covers and plopped onto the floor before trudging towards her sister like a man set to be hanged. Fortuna was a little surprised; there had been hints of animosity between Flavia and her sisters, but it seemed she'd downplayed its severity.

Flavia left without saying goodbye.

Which left Fortuna alone with Professor Lupin, who was still half-supporting himself on the bed's railing.

She watched him as he continued to catch his breath. However acute his mind was, not even being a werewolf had kept him in shape.

"Headmaster Dumbledore would like to have a word with you, whenever you believe you are ready," Professor Lupin said at last.

"Yes, sir," Fortuna replied, dread pooling in the pit of her stomach. Between the fact her power hadn't been able to anticipate everything magic threw her way and the choices she'd made to intervene instead of staying quiet, too many notable things had happened to her. She hadn't even made it a month before catching the Headmaster's eye.

She would have to manage the meeting very carefully, then aggressively control future events to prevent things from getting out of control. She was reluctant to start looking ahead very far, as she'd never been particularly interested in forming longer-term plans. Considering more than one specific question at a time would make it too easy to get lost in her power, too easy to start living in the future at the cost of the present.

Still. Doing damage control after the fact was getting to be irritating.

As was staring at Professor Lupin, who was trying to figure out how to ask her how she'd known he was a werewolf without using those exact words.

_No._

"Professor," she said, "would you mind if I catch up with Flavia? I'm doing better and I'd feel safer back in the Gryffindor common room."

"Oh," he said, floundering a little. "Well, yes, I suppose, but hurry! I don't want you running around the halls alone."

The "yes" was all Fortuna needed to hear. She was out of her bed and dashing towards the door before Professor Lupin had finished speaking. She made quick work of the two corridors between her and the de Luces, only slowing when she could see them.

"Sneaking around the castle at night, skulking about—Daphne and I never did anything like this. Eight combined years at Hogwarts and not a single house point lost, not a single detention, not a single complaint from a single teacher. You odious, heedless, tapioca-brained beast!"

"Quit talking to yourself in public, _Feely_," Flavia drawled. "You'll make your suitors fear for the stability of your genes."

"Why should you care? It's not like we're related." Ophelia paused, decided that her point wasn't explicit enough, and continued. "Our genes are completely different."

A switch flipped. Suddenly Flavia was furious, fists balled and face knotted up. "No they aren't! Take that back!"

"Just you wait," Ophelia went on, voice sickly sweet. It had been funnier coming from the Boggart. "When I tell Father what you've done, he'll realize what a terrible mistake he made and have you shipped back to the Muggle orphanage you came from. Ha, then you'll be sorry you caused so much trouble."

"You take that back! Father wouldn't do that. _Harriet _wouldn't have done that! Say you're lying! Say I'm your sister, you pinch-faced bandicoot!"

Fortuna had never heard Flavia respond like that before. She was used to hearing her friend speak with confidence—perhaps with more confidence than was always warranted—but now she floundered like a child. Fortuna could almost swear she was holding back tears.

She wasn't sure how Ophelia's words had wounded Flavia so deeply, but she was going to rectify this situation.

"I'm an orphan."

The argument came to an abrupt end as both wheeled to face Fortuna, standing a few meters away down the hall.

"I've had to live in a foster home ever since my parents were murdered. Three and a half years. It's not the best, but it's safe and warm and I don't have anywhere else. It isn't right to mock children for having to live that way."

Flavia seemed to regain her bearings, but Ophelia was too chagrined to muster an immediate reply. She stammered a bit as she tried to come up with an apology that would be adequate but not give an inch to her little sister.

Fortuna chose to offer her no help.

"I apologize," Ophelia said at last. "That was insensitive of me, and I shouldn't have said it. Please follow me back to your common room, since you are now _both _breaking curfew."

Their footsteps echoed through the empty halls as they progressed through the longest ten minutes of silence the three of them had ever experienced. With Ophelia chastised, Flavia cooling off, and Fortuna determined to be anodyne, nobody advanced a topic for conversation. When the Gryffindor common room finally came into sight, it was like discovering a waterhole in the desert.

"Your password has been changed to 'bulrush,'" Opehlia informed them, and the Fat Lady's portrait opened at the word. "And I will be writing to Father about your behavior."

Fortuna hustled a nearly vibrating Flavia into the common room. Her friend's flare of temper had passed she was rearing to investigate the hallway for any signs of Black, but that couldn't be done in front of Ophelia.

"Did you hear!" Flavia erupted as soon as the portrait hole had closed. "Sirius Black has attacked our own common room! Our quarry stood in this very spot less than an hour ago, and we weren't here to see it. It just _had _to happen on the day that we weren't here."

Flavia began to pace around the room in a huff, going in circles around the couches. "Damn," she exclaimed. "Double damn. Oh, of all the days to leave. If we'd gone to the Shrieking Shack tonight, we might have run into him on our way back."

"I don't think so," Fortuna said. "We typically come back before one on school nights, and Black must have arrived here at around three-thirty."

"That's assuming he got caught as soon as he came in. Maybe he came here earlier but had trouble getting into the common room, or maybe he was here for a while before somebody noticed."

Flavia's eyes began darting around the room as she made her case, desperately searching for anything that appeared out of place. She was convinced that there was something that the teachers had missed, and accordingly she pushed tables around and rummaged under couches, looking for any clues.

"The Fat Lady's Portrait wasn't harmed, which means he must have found another way in," Fortuna said.

"Or he had the password," Flavia said, tiptoeing around an end table and inspecting every scuff mark across it as though looking for fingerprints. "We'll have to ask her, once the coast is clear. Maybe during dinner."

While Flavia made her rounds, bending and twisting to try and look at the room from every angle, Fortuna decided to stand by the door. If Black had entered via the portrait, what would he have seen?

A tidy enough room—assuming he'd arrived after the house elves would have cleaned around two—and nothing else save the staircases leading up to the dorms. He had gotten past the Dementors, the teachers, the ghosts, and the Fat Lady. There was nothing to slow him down; it should have been a straight shot from the entrance to the boys' dorms. Perhaps the Boy-Who Lived's room was splattered with blood, but somehow Fortuna doubted it.

"My question," Fortuna said, "is why he did not immediately go to the boys' bedrooms and attack Harry Potter."

Flavia straightened up to see what Fortuna was looking at. She saw—or rather, she understood what she wasn't seeing, to wit: a reason Sirius Black shouldn't have butchered Harry Potter in his sleep—and frowned.

"Someone must have seen him," Fortuna said, "And he ran. But why? Why would someone who can kill a dozen people with a word have considered a house elf or an underage student to be so threatening he had to abandon his mission?"

"House elves have their own kinds of magic. And even students have wands. He might have _had_ to run."

"If he has the connections to escape from Azkaban and get the password to our common room, he surely has the connections to get a wand."

Fortuna considered that thought as Flavia dug her way into the space behind two plush armchairs. An accomplice made the most sense, but who? There was only one obvious answer that came to mind: a professor. Who else would have that level of access and knowledge about Hogwarts? It was difficult to imagine any of the strange characters that found their employment at Hogwarts allowing a convicted criminal in to kill a child, but if not them, then who?

"Aha!" Flavia yelled with unbridled glee. She leapt to her feet and brandished a small little ball of fuzz at Fortuna.

"It's dust," Fortuna said, a little peeved her thoughts had been disrupted for a clump of detritus.

Flavia thrust her closed fist into the air. "It's hair," she proclaimed.

Fortuna gave the dust bunny another disdainful look.

"It's hair," Flavia went on, "But it's not _human_ hair. There has to be something here that would give away something. Perhaps Black is sleeping with horses or hiding with rats, or—"

"How do you know Black left it?"

"Because everything else is clean, obviously."

This _was_ obvious, and Fortuna kicked herself.

"We'll have to interview the house elves, too, to help us pinpoint the time of entry."

"But who could be helping him?"

"Whoever it is," Flavia responded with a smile, "I'm sure we're going to find out."

* * *

Fortuna's power led her through the rest of the morning, and she was only half-aware as her teachers and classmates came and went like so much white noise. The threat presented by the meeting with Headmaster Dumbeldore occupied much of her attention.

For one thing, there was who she was. A pale-faced, black-haired, and scrupulously polite and neat orphan would rub him the wrong way, and he would be left with a vague sense that something was not quite right about her.

This was annoying. It was not her fault that her actual personality aligned with the false one presented by a megalomaniac fifty years ago.

There was also the ornate instrument with a lot of fiddly bits that would react when she came near it. When she asked herself why, she learned that the device detected unusual things. Something unusual would spark the Headmaster's curiosity—she wouldn't be a priority, but he'd start to keep a mental file on her, and anything she did that at Hogwarts for the next seven years would be catalogued in it.

All because a convoluted and wholly unnecessary contraption was going to make a _phweee _noise at her. It would have to go.

And she would lie, of course, adopt a false persona to get her through the meeting. She'd go with something that would make her seem harmless, a little endearing, and ultimately below consideration. Not just forgettable, but dismissible.

Transfiguration was immediately before lunch, and Professor McGonagall once again asked her to stay back. She followed up on Professor Lupin's lecture regarding rule-breaking and danger, then advised Fortuna on how to get to Headmaster Dumbledore's office.

Fortuna _yes professor_ed her way through the conversation, and stopped off at a bathroom near her destination to prepare the impression she wanted to give her interrogator. She undid her tie and redid it sloppily. Then she released her hair from its ponytail and teased it until it was a tangled nest.

_Not unlike Angelique or Hermione_, she thought, as she rearranged her neatly packed bookbag into a disaster. She half-zipped it, leaving parchment, quills, and books sticking out at odd angles, then slung it over her shoulder and examined the effect in the mirror. A harried, scatter-brained child stared anxiously back at her.

Perfect.

"Mars Bar," she told the gargoyle. It stepped aside and she followed a spiral staircase up a storey, where she faced a closed door. She gave it a calculatedly tentative tap, just loud enough for the office's occupant to hear.

"Come in," he said.

She pushed the door slightly open and peeked around its edge, as though she were terrified of what she might find on the other side.

"Welcome, Miss Floris."

She shoved the door fully open, and came face to face with the headmaster.

He was difficult to see through the busy chaos of his office. Gadgets moved, people came and went from portraits, and a live bird examined her closely. She could hardly focus; the twirling, twinkling, whirling, and feathered clutter drew her eyes from one oddity to another until she was disoriented, confused, and (in spite of herself) just a little bit excited. If there were any method to the madness, Fortuna would have to ask her power. She wouldn't be surprised if it came up empty.

As for the Headmaster, he was an imposing man, though not in a way that made her feel unsafe—not that anything made her feel unsafe. No, he was more like a grandfather, someone who commanded respect with his very presence, but kindly and benign. It was calculated; familiar as she was with how much body language and nonverbal signals could convey, she could recognize a master.

She was impressed.

"Ah, Miss Floris," Professor Dumbledore said. "Please have a seat."

As Fortuna made her way towards his desk, she tripped on some aggressive lint, and crashed into the assortment of noisy oddments on his desk.

Her bookbag exploded. Stacks of parchment collapsed. The bird squawked as it took flight and fluttered about the office. Her target—the instrument that would have detected "something unusual" about her—was smashed to bits as it fell to the floor.

Fortuna stammered a dozen different apologies, but the Headmaster graciously waved them all aside, saying that he would repair it once their meeting was completed.

He was lying to spare what he imagined to be her feelings; the witch who had invented it was long dead and had only made the one. It was irreplaceable, unless Fortuna herself wished to use her power to repair it, and she did not.

Good riddance.

She hastily crammed everything back into her bag and collapsed into one of the plush chairs Professor Dumbledore had arranged in front of his desk. From this angle, she was only able to see the man through a trench of parchment on one side and agitated (but intact) accoutrements on the other.

"Now," he said, reorganizing the scattered papers with his wand. "I would like to apologize myself. I heard you were injured but I didn't ask how you were doing. I'm glad you have recovered so quickly and admirably."

"Uh," Fortuna said. "Erm. Yes, er, sir."

She marveled at the idiocy coming out of her mouth. Her power had never led her down such an insufferable path before.

Too bad. If she hadn't wanted this, she should have exercised more caution and thought her way around the fog.

"How are you finding Hogwarts?" he asked pleasantly.

"Amazing, sir." She made her eyes wide and bright. "I never imagined anything like this before."

"I know the transition from a non-magical world to, well, all of _this_—" He gestured at his office, whose decor was still spinning and emitting puffs of smoke. "—can be bewildering."

The casual statement was in fact a probing question. There were many different answers that could be provided to such a simple observation, and he'd draw conclusions from whatever she offered.

"It still is, sir. But I'm adjusting quickly, or at least I hope so. A lot of my classmates are working together to make sure we all understand our lessons, and the things we're learning are just incredible."

"Marvelous. Nothing warms an old professor's heart more." The Headmaster beamed at her. "Professor McGonagall informs me you are proving to be quite adept at Transfiguration."

"I love it," she gushed. "It's so fascinating! Er, it's so fascinating, _sir_."

His blue eyes twinkled, and surely that was a magical effect generated by his spectacles. "I'm partial to the subject myself," he went on. "I taught it for many years before I took this position. In fact, Professor McGonagall was one of my students, and she says you are a natural."

"O-oh." She wrung her hands. "Oh, that can't be right, sir. My classmates are all so talented, and they've been helping me ever so much."

"I'm glad you're adapting so quickly," he said. He leaned forward onto his desk, and his smile grew still more tender. "You grew up with a Muggle foster family, I understand."

"Yessir." Then she looked up at him fearfully, like she'd just answered a test question and was afraid she'd gotten it wrong. When she received nothing but calm attentiveness in return, she went on. "My parents died when I was eight."

"And—ah—perhaps they were not as kind as they could have been."

A vile untruth, she was sure. The two or three surviving shreds of her memory were happy, and she now knew her parents had died defending her. She had been loved.

_I'm sorry_, she thought, as her body language lied. Hunched shoulders, downward glance, no verbal answer. All to indicate his guesses about her homelife—and the identity of her Boggart—were accurate.

_I'm so sorry._

_"_Unhappy familial arrangements are common, as your classmates largely demonstrated yesterday."

At least her power spared her from having to answer that.

"But Professor Lupin told me that a classmate quite literally leapt to your defense. One of the greatest triumphs of the human spirit is that we are not alone in our fears. There will always be another ready to stand behind us."

Fortuna rubbed at the wrist she had broken, while nodding along with the headmaster's words. "I'm so happy that everyone here is so friendly."

"True friendship is the most precious gift in this world. I'm glad you could find it at such a young age." The Headmaster's smile faded from his lips, and he lowered his voice. "Now, Miss Floris, I do have to ask something of you. You aren't in any trouble so please do not worry—this will not be going onto any record. I must ask for the sake of a friend."

Fortuna nodded.

"Remus also told me that your Boggart called him a werewolf."

Here it was, the true reason he'd called her in. He wanted to know how his professor's secret had gotten out.

"It said—it said a lot of horrible things. And it all happened so fast."

"Do you have any idea how the Boggart came to identify Professor Lupin as a werewolf?"

"Because it was scary? Werewolves aren't _real_. She just said whatever sounded awful."

"It," he said. "Not she. Identifying and naming your fears is the first step to conquering them."

_Not it. Me._

"I know," she said.

Professor Dumbledore leaned back into his armchair, pondering. A Boggart successfully focusing on two targets was unheard of, so he would have to reconcile what had happened with what he saw in front of him.

And what he saw in front of him was a girl who—poor child—was utterly and indiscriminately terrified by authority figures. Someone who likely believed that a cruel parent would know every possible secret, and use that knowledge to undermine, silence, injure. The boggart had simply shown her what she'd expected.

This was not a case of someone deducing the truth about the Defense professor so early in the year (and Fortuna made a mental note to ask herself about that phrasing and the assumptions behind it later), but instead a case of a monster run amok.

"Werewolves do exist in our world," he said, once he had arrived at his conclusion. "It is a terrible, incurable affliction, and one that is often misunderstood. There are those who wish to exclude wizards who are werewolves, just as there are those who wish to exclude witches who were born to Muggle parents."

She saw the threads of manipulation. They were less threads than they were ropes; he did not think she was very clever, which was both insulting and precisely what she'd meant him to think. He was equating her teacher's condition to her being Muggleborn, drawing an alliance between the two, ensuring she would not speak.

He needn't have bothered. She wouldn't ever use someone's wounds against them. She wasn't that woman.

Professor Dumbledore continued. "I have complete faith and trust in Professor Lupin, but there are those who would use his—call it an illness—as a pretext to ostracize him. I would ask you keep the secret, as it is not rightfully yours to share."

She nodded so vigorously she was nearly worried her power might snap her head off to better sell the ruse. "Of course, sir."

The Headmaster smiled. "Then thank you for your time. I know it can be hard to make the trek up here, but it is good to see a new face every now and then. Seeing new students gives these old bones some life."

Fortuna giggled vapidly, bobbling her head. He dismissed her, and she practically scampered out of his office.

Once she was safely out of range, she dropped the smile and readjusted her robes. She reclaimed herself before she reached the bottom of the spiral staircase.

Except for her hair. She still needed to brush it.

Then she would solve a mystery.


	12. Chapter 12: Over Easy Detectives

"Eureka!"

Startled, Fortuna nearly pitched forward into the grand piano she was perched on.

Flavia was framed in the doorway to the stairwell of the Shrieking Shack, holding a beaker of electric blue liquid aloft in both hands.

"Eureka," she said again, reverently lowering the container. "What are you doing?"

"Tuning the piano without—" She caught herself. "Magic. With a wrench."

"But nothing to tell you what pitch you're hitting?"

Fortuna looked down at the piano's insides, at the parchment jammed between two of the strings that were responsible for middle C. She'd been at it for twenty minutes. "I'm starting to think I may be tone deaf," she said reflectively.

"I'll ask Feely for a spell that will keep it tuned," Flavia said. "She won't tell me willingly, so I'll poison her and hold the antidote hostage. Do you play?"

"No, but I'd be good at it if I learned, so we should make sure it works." Fortuna gestured at the beaker. "What did you find?"

Flavia raised her discovery once more. "The substance we discovered in the Gryffindor common room on Tuesday morning is dog hair. Since students may only have an owl or a rat or a cat or a toad, we can deduce it wasn't left by a student. Who was in the common room that wasn't a student? Sirius Black."

"But what can it mean, Holmes?"

"It means, Watson, that Sirius Black—" Flavia consciously paused for dramatic effect. "Has a dog."

"We have a dog," Fortuna said.

Behind her, the sound of Alexander devouring his fourth steak and kidney pie of the evening stopped.

The two girls looked at him. Noticing their stares, he started wagging his tail.

But even canine antics couldn't distract Flavia from the disappointment. She groaned. "We do have a dog, and this is just his hair."

Fortuna sympathized. It had been too much to hope that everything was going to fall into place with the simple application of a few gray cells, but their complete lack of progress was dispiriting. Four days had elapsed since Sirius Black's brief appearance, and their only real clue had just proved to be a red herring. She'd known better than to actually believe they would find secret passages hidden within every cupboard, that leggy dames who knew too much would walk into their office, or that a priceless treasure hidden in an ordinary statue would fall into her lap, but she had expected a little bit of progress by now.

"We could make a list of suspects," Fortuna suggested.

"Using what evidence?" Flavia asked, sounding morose.

"Well, we know it's someone at Hogwarts because the Fat Lady confirmed that he knew the password," Fortuna said. "That narrows the suspect pool down from 'anyone in Wizarding Britain.'"

Flavia agreed, and they went upstairs to their lab. Fortuna suggested they brainstorm and transfigured part of a wall into a chalkboard.

The first name Flavia wrote was that of Professor Binns.

"The obvious suspect," she declared.

Fortuna arched her eyebrows. "There's no evidence to say that he did it."

"Precisely," Flavia returned. "As a ghost, he leaves no evidence anywhere at all."

"That's logically unsound," Fortuna said.

"Well, perhaps, but we can't rule him out. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, at least not when the absence is the evidence. Besides, it's never the obvious suspect."

Fortuna doubted this was logically sound, either, but didn't feel like untangling it. It wasn't as though she knew enough to truly rule anyone out. Still, surely there were more likely suspects?

"Remus Lupin," she suggested. If he was concealing something that the majority of people thought should get him fired, what else might he be capable of hiding?

She had spoken without thinking, and found herself wondering how she could justify her suggestion without breaking her promise not to reveal that he was a werewolf.

But Flavia didn't even hesitate. "Excellent," she said. "The Defense Against the Dark Arts position is supposedly cursed, so people who aren't desperate or stupid or evil don't take the job. One of them was actually You-Know-Who in disguise, or something like that. It was Daffy's first year and the rumors were hard to sort out."

"Cursed?" Fortuna asked. "And nobody's broken the curse?"

"It wouldn't be a cursed position if someone had broken the curse."

Unlike her analysis of their History of Magic professor's guilt, this was logically sound. "Has anyone tried to break the curse, then?"

"Well, I suppose someone must have tried before. The Board wouldn't just let a teaching position be cursed for years if they could help it. And Dumbledore is a very powerful magician in his own right—if he could have fixed it, I'm sure he would have by now."

Idly, Fortuna wondered what the headmaster had missed.

A cursed object, hidden by You-Know-Who in a room accessible only to those who were desperate to hide evidence. A shabby tiara, openly placed among tens of thousands of abandoned things, exposed only on occasion to people in a hurry to get rid of something and get away.

Hiding in plain sight.

Fortuna thought about her strategy with the study group.

Dumbledore wouldn't find out, and he'd continue to lose defense professors to scandal, injury, illness, and death. It was possible for her to stop it, though she felt annoyed with herself for even considering the possibility. It was his job, not hers.

But what about the people affected? Did Professor Lupin deserve to suffer a possibly deadly mishap because he'd taken the only job he could get? Did Angelique deserve to grow up without someone to teach her how to fend off basic magical household pests? Did she want to deal with the disruption to her plans for her classmates that the inconsistency of teaching quality would cause?

There was only one answer.

"Well, in that case, we'll have to keep a closer eye on him," she said, mentally resolving to break the curse when she got back to the castle. If they made it back by four, she'd have enough time.

"And Minverva McGonagall," Flavia added. "Nobody would question her presence in Gryffindor Tower, and she was the first teacher on the scene."

Severus Snape naturally followed. It was easy to cast the slick-haired professor as a villain, as he was exactly the kind of dodgy person who would cavort with cloaked individuals in shady bars. The mere mention of his name roused Alexander's hackles, another sure sign their professor was somehow involved.

Flavia rounded out the first column with "Another Professor." A bit generic, but it captured the fact that every professor had the means to assist a serial killer breaking into Hogwarts.

She hesitated a moment, then wrote down the names of Ophelia and Daphne de Luce.

Fortuna folded her arms.

"What? You saw how Feely was that night! They're both menaces. You don't know them like I do. They're like crazed badgers."

Fortuna allowed her friend's rant to wear itself out before she got back to the list, adding Filch and Hermione Granger.

"Not Filch. He's the butler, can't have done it. That cat of his, though…" Flavia trailed off. "Who's Hermione Granger?"

"Aside from the fact she's a Gryffindor and is therefore the only student on our list who could have let Black in, she's one of Harry Potter's friends and could provide access to him."

Flavia considered this argument, then wrote Candidus Craven beneath Hermione's name.

Fortuna agreed. If anyone in their friend group harbored traitorous intentions, it was definitely Candidus.

Schmuck.

The last names were the Weasley twins and the Fat Lady, based on the fact they were the only witnesses—the only real witnesses. Gryffindor Tower was filled to the brim with students who were eagerly boasting about their brush with death, but cursory interrogation revealed that none of them had even been aware of Black's arrival until the deputy headmistress was rallying them for a headcount.

The Fat Lady played up her adventure as well. Evidently, spending one's existence glued to a wall did not make for entertaining fare, and she milked the tale for all it was worth. This proved not to be much; though able to perform her job out of instinct, she had been sleeping off a bottle of merlot she'd shared with a knight from the fifth floor.

Only Fred and George Weasley had managed to see the man, though they hadn't even realized who he was before he was gone. They had been working on an invention when he entered, and he'd bolted immediately on seeing them. The most they could say was that they were pretty sure he'd been wandless.

There was nothing really to go off of there, so their best bet was to tackle their list of suspects. Gather more evidence, perhaps do a little bit of stalking, ransack their rooms for clues, and figure out a plan of attack.

But not tonight, she thought, sitting down on a corner of the bed and kicking her shoes off. She was exhausted after all the detentions with Filch, an exercise in gruntwork and wasted time she hoped she would never experience again. They'd scrupulously followed the detentions with nightly trips to the Shrieking Shack, lest the Veritaserum go neglected or Alexander starve, so she hadn't gotten more than four hours of sleep a night.

Flavia had already started to drift over to her potions table, and Fortuna settled into the blankets. It was already almost one, and she'd need a nap if she wanted to destroy the tiara before Dumbledore woke up and be able to make it through their Saturday study group meeting.

It felt like she'd been walking for hours. She was back in the hospital, walking past white rooms through white hallways under white lights. Everything bright, sterile, painful to look at.

Finally she stopped at the foot of a girl's bed. Skin sagged off her body and the pallor of death lay over her like a blanket. The girl's lips moved but there was no sound. Her lips slowed and her body stilled aside from labored breathing, assisted along by two tubes running up her nose. She reached forward and reached forward and—

The girl's face split open in a dozen different places, and bark sprang up between the cracks and spread, replacing her flesh. The transformation spread down her body and one of her arms lengthened. It slithered, vine-like, around her thighs and fused to her legs. Her other hand merged with her cheek, leaving her face half-covered.

There was no way to dislodge that hand, nothing for her to do but scream.

Fortuna opened her eyes.

Alexander was looking at her with an expression she could only call concerned. She saw that her arm was dangling off the bed, and that he was nudging her hand. Waking her up.

She slid out of bed and wrapped her arms around him, resting her cheek against his shoulder. His fur smelled like daffodils and nightshade, courtesy of the anti-flea shampoo she and Flavia had concocted.

The attack on her parents, the extinction of her native language, her memory loss: she'd subconsciously been assuming they were the result of a magical accident. If she could figure out how magic worked, she could figure out how it had happened.

She'd been wrong.

Someone did this on purpose.

She tried to remember details from her dream, any faces or words that could give her a place to start, but all that remained was the conviction that someone had deliberately created the monsters in a controlled environment. If Alexander hadn't woken her up mid-nightmare, she wouldn't even have that.

No. No need to frame it like that. Progress was progress. Three weeks ago, she'd known nothing. Now she had a starting point and a number of clues, each pointing to something bigger and more sinister than the last. A malevolent intelligence seemed to be at work, and she would need to approach that with patience and caution.

She could do that. She could do anything.

"Thank you," she told Alexander.

"Hm?" Flavia asked. She was bent over a cauldron.

"Nothing." Fortuna got up and went over to see what her friend was doing. "What are you working on? I thought we didn't have to do anything else for the Veritaserum."

"Poison," Flavia said, drawing out the word with relish. "For Ophelia, of course."

"Of course," Fortuna said automatically. "We should be getting back. It's past three."

Flavia rolled up her sleeve and looked at her wrist. Then she looked at Fortuna. "How do you tell time without a watch?"

"By the position of the sun," Fortuna said, preparing to take point. They'd need to avoid a prefect, Professor Burbage, two seventh-years, Mrs. Norris, Peeves, and an entire congress of ghosts to make it back without getting caught. "Come on. Maybe Black is back in our common room."

It turned out that Black was nowhere to be seen, but Flavia was tired enough she wasn't disappointed. Fortuna watched her go up the stairs to their dorm and continued to watch the stairs after she'd disappeared, waiting.

Two minutes later, Harbinger appeared. He'd come to associate Flavia's nocturnal return with hers, and he had deduced her presence down here from her absence up there.

She grinned as he trotted down to greet her, tail and head held high. He was so smart, she thought as she picked him up and ran a fingernail along his vibrating throat. He was the smartest cat in Hogwarts—

Hermione's cat was smarter. Annoyed, she prodded her power for a better, more correct answer. After a few moments, she was able to console herself with the fact that this Crookshanks was only half a cat.

And Harbinger was a whole cat, a complete cat, a perfect cat. He was undeniably the handsomest—

Most people would agree that Kenneth Towler's calico Artemis Loudmouth was the most attractive of the Hogwarts feline population. Then there were Farfallele, a tuxedo cat who sported a white bowtie-shaped mustache, and Catacadabra, a long-haired, squash-faced Persian that people inexplicably admired despite the fact that she was a long-haired, squash-faced Persian.

As Fortuna went down the list of purebreds, tabbies, and tortoiseshells, she realized that only she had the appropriate respect and regard for sleek gray cats. In a Hogwarts beauty pageant, Harbinger would come in forty-nine of sixty-one, and he was only that high because he was still a kitten and that boosted his perceived cuteness. As an adult, he would rank fifty-three.

Deeply offended, she took her hypothetically slighted cat to a couch and contemplated the wisdom of not asking questions. He wriggled out of her arms and started sharpening his claws on the cushion next to her, indifferent to the benighted rabble that surrounded him. Fortuna commended him on his nobility and magnanimity, then rooted through a bag a second-year had left in front of the fire for a quill and piece of parchment.

Harbinger batted at the quill and she teased him for a few minutes.

She was dithering.

She triple-checked that nobody else was around and finally brought herself to write a single sentence.

My name is Fortuna Floris and I have a superpower.

She put the quill down, folded the parchment into a little square, and tucked it in her pocket.

Now she had something that needed to be hidden.

Step two was to go to the seventh floor.


	13. Chapter 13: Too Young To Die(adem)

The seventh floor was hardly ever occupied, as it found itself in the awkward space below the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw common rooms as well as the Astronomy Tower, but above the classrooms that were actually used. Truthfully, so much of the castle was packed with assorted wonderments that the odd empty classroom or boring hallway tended to be overlooked. It almost had Fortuna wondering how many other seemingly useless areas were containing some secret or hitherto unknown purpose, but that was an investigation for a different day.

She stopped in front of a neoclassical rendering of an awkward and ineffectual ballet lesson and began to pace, focusing on the opposite wall and clutching the note in her pocket like it was a grenade she'd pulled the pin out of but couldn't throw. Eventually the solid stone parted, forming a door, and she pushed it open.

Inside was a complete madhouse. Stacks of books towered towards the cathedral-high ceiling, and they seemed to be so haphazardly arranged that they threatened to fall. Furniture, discarded and broken, had been thrown into piles that stretched up at least four times Fortuna's own height. Unwashed cauldrons caked with hardened, unidentifiable grime stood in rows one after the other. Strange contraptions, amalgamations of 14th century technology and magic, wheeled or fluttered about as they pleased.

The closest frame of reference she had for comparison was the Simmonses' house. Furniture heaped together, generations of children's toys all over, the accoutrements of last year's hobbies packed away and forgotten. The room here was considerably larger and more packed, but the similarities were there. This place was for discarded things.

She stared at the secret written on parchment for a moment, then let it go. A flick of her wand, an uttered word, and the paper burst into flames. It was ash before it hit the ground.

Once she'd vanished the ashes, she padded her way between piles of odds and ends, letting her power act as a sherpa. She was only briefly distracted by a particularly dapper hat that had been thrown onto a bedpost of a bed broken down the middle. (She pressed onward because it had been bewitched to clamp down on the eyes and ears of the wearer when in sunlight.)

At one point, a pile of empty sherry bottles blocked access to a narrow path between desks that looked like they'd gotten in the way of a duel. A swift kick to one of the load-bearing bottles opened the walkway. A storm of glass crashed down around Fortuna as she walked through the middle of the crumbling monument to alcoholism to her destination.

The source of the curse on the Defense Against the Dark Arts position sat nestled amid a dirty pile of old textbooks. The crown was dull gray, like tarnished silverware, and almost disappointing for a work of evil that had disrupted magical education for decades. When Fortuna got closer she saw that an inscription, clear and bright, shone through its grubbiness.

W_it beyond measure is man's greatest treasure_.

Stupid. She knew, or could know, everything there was to know, and all that did was cause problems.

She ransacked a nearby cabinet for linen and, careful not to touch the thing itself, wrapped it up, and placed it in the pocket of her robes. Her quarry secured, she made her escape, stopping only to grab a vial of malevolently frothing liquid she was sure Flavia would appreciate. Filch would come down the hallway in eight seconds, but both she and the door would already have vanished.

The unwelcome appearance of Sirius Black had set the school itself on edge, and she had to dodge patrolling suits of armor and the watchful eyes of portraits. As she allowed her power to guide her, flowing around obstacles and weaving between pairs of prefects, she was keenly aware of how uncomfortably the diadem weighed her pocket down.

Even wrapped in old pillow cases, it felt too close to her skin, reminding her that this was _dangerous_. Of course she'd worded her question to ensure that the curse on the crown wouldn't hurt her or anyone else as she destroyed it, but hadn't her power failed her before? Could she really be sure of it?

This wasn't sensible, and it also wasn't what she _wanted_. She shouldn't be doing this—interfering, letting her foreknowledge dictate her actions to the point where she betrayed her own intentions. She had told herself before that she would never use her power like this, meddling just because she could.

She'd vowed never to let it become the thing that guided her, subsumed her—but even now, as she hopped down a flight of stairs to take a round-about path to avoid the wandering divination teacher, she felt like a passenger in her own body.

The affairs of the greater Wizarding World didn't have to be her problem. It wasn't her place, it was Dumbledore's. Couldn't she just tell him and let _him_ take care of it?

No, that was out of the question. The Headmaster would only want to know how _she'd _known. But there had to be another solution, one that didn't involve her taking responsibility for everyone else. She just couldn't think of it, but if this thing really could grant wisdom, perhaps she could _use _it. Use it to come up with a way to solve the problem without destroying yet another priceless artifact, perhaps by combining its powers with hers—

_What?_

No. These weren't her thoughts.

The curse was trying to protect itself. It sensed her intentions and it didn't _want _to be broken. Unfortunately for it, all it had to offer her was the vague promise of power, which she had more than enough of. As for the destruction of magical gizmos, freeing Hogwarts from a curse should count as suitable repayment. She and Professor Dumbledore would be _more _than even.

All her apprehension was washed away like chalk in a rainstorm, and she resumed walking with fresh determination. Helping her friends, especially in a way nobody ever had to know about, could take precedence just this once.

Fortuna had to duck behind a statue of Lorenzo the Forgetful Knight, a statue having long ago misplaced its original apparel and now clothed itself in students' old clothes while wielding a large ladle instead of a lance, in order to avoid all four heads of house.

Deep in the early morning, each and every one looked utterly exhausted. Perhaps it was a trick of the torchlight, but she could swear dark circles rimmed every pair of eyes and the normally well-kempt appearance of all was slipping. Even Professor Snape looked worse than he usually did, which was surely an achievement.

"Good work the dementors did! And Fudge wants to send in more _and _Auror teams to boot. Aurors! You'd think he views the school as a warzone."

"A child could have died, Pomona," said Professor McGonagall, "and not just _any _child. I understand Minister Fudge's concern, though I don't agree with the methods."

"Perhaps if your common room had been better guarded, then Potter wouldn't have been in any danger at all," Snape said.

McGonagall fumed, but Flitwick intervened before she could retort. "Severus, we could enchant all the quills in the castle to come flying at the first sight of Black, but it wouldn't do any good once he decides to blow the common room apart. If he feels threatened, he's that much more likely to do something rash. I believe that—"

The rest of their conversation was lost as they passed by, and Fortuna rushed forward to give the gargoyle statue the password and hurry up the staircase.

The office was empty, which in and of itself made clear how seriously Professor Dumbledore took Black's incursion into his school. The Headmaster was gone, attending an early morning meeting with Minister Fudge, and had instructed the portraits and his phoenix to patrol the castle in his absence.

Here Fortuna had a choice. She could get the sword by breaking its case with a reductor curse or she could get it out of the Sorting Hat.

Fewer steps to use the curse, but...

She strode across the office over to the Hat and jammed it down around her ears.

_Don't give me the sword yet_, she thought. _I have a block on my memory. Can you look past it?_

The Hat's voice, which she hadn't gotten to hear during her Sorting, seemed to speak in her ear. "I cannot."

Frustration simmered within her, but she pushed further.

_What about my power? Can you see it? _

"I cannot."

_Well, is there anything you _can _see? _

"I can see I was spot-on as always," the Hat said, and now it sounded tired and annoyed, like she might if someone tried to make her list the kings and queens of England in order and explain why they were supposedly relevant to anything. "Sneaking out of school to have adventures, bypassing the government to catch a murder, and burglarizing the Headmaster's office to break curses, all within the first month of school… I should request a raise from Albus."

Fortuna felt vaguely offended. _I don't think I'm chivalrous or bold, but you put me in Gryffindor. That means you understand parts of me that I don't. It was perfectly logical to suppose that you might know something more, but I see you think I'm just a troublemaker._

"If you don't think you're chivalrous or bold or even a troublemaker, what _do _you think you are?"

Fortuna's mind went blank for several seconds.

_I don't know_.

"I'm a thinking cap, but I won't think for you."

So she thought more.

Not a vessel for her power.

A witch. A child. An orphan.

Lately, a detective and a lab assistant and a friend and a tutor.

_Nothing much._

"Is that so? Why am I back on your head?"

_To get the sword_.

"No," the Hat said cheerily. "You aren't a Gryffindor in need, and I see that you know you could just get the sword by smashing up that case. Why are you really here?"

_You just accused me of being tailor-made for Gryffindor_, she mentally snapped.

"In _need_," the Hat repeated. "You _want _the sword but you don't _need_ the sword. You don't think there's anything truly at stake, no need to call on your House's virtues."

_I'm here to protect my friends from an evil curse. That's not Gryffindor enough?_

"It might be if you were truly here for your friends."

_Huh?_

"Not a Ravenclaw, are we?"

_I'm smarter than you are_, she thought; then, when the Hat started to laugh, she realized that had been a stupid thing to say. Except she hadn't said it, the Hat was simply reading her mind. Which was cheating.

"I don't mean to prick your pride, little lioness. What were you thinking when I sorted you?"

She cast her mind back.

The Dementors? No, the Sorting had taken place before Dumbledore had given her the idea to go after them. But she'd been dead on her feet, propelling herself forward because of them… No. Because of what she'd found out because of them.

_My parents. I remembered how they'd died. I was upset._

"Yet you weren't most preoccupied by shock or grief. You were ashamed because of your inaction, convinced you should have saved them all. That is what you were thinking when you put me on, and that is how you think of it still. Failure to be the hero."

_And why wasn't I? Why didn't I do anything? Tell me what I was thinking. Tell me why I let something terrible happen to my parents but won't let something inconvenient happen to my friends._

"You have the only answer I can give, Gryffindor."

The pommel of the sword slammed into her head. She yelped and yanked the hat off, sending the sword clattering to the ground.

She snatched it up and hurried over to the desk. She didn't have time to waste. The Hat's unwillingness to give direct, to-the-point answers had eaten into the time she had to get away.

She placed the diadem in the middle of the headmaster's desk, planted her feet just so, lifted the sword above her head, and swung.

The diadem screamed as it sheared in twain, which was needlessly melodramatic, and far too noisy. The commotion would bring the portraits running and she needed to be well shot of the office before they arrived, so she left the sword embedded a good way into the desk.

As she ran, she reached into the minds of her friends and tore through their memories of their sortings. Flavia had gotten a choice between every house but Hufflepuff, and she'd chosen Gryffindor to be like her mother. Jessica had been offered Hufflepuff, but she'd craved the challenge of being Muggleborn in Slytherin. Candidus could have gotten into Slytherin if he'd really cared.

Even Angelique, who hadn't had any choice at all, had been chosen because she _was _something. Kind and caring and warm and persistent.

And what did she have? A shred of a memory and the conviction she'd failed.

She'd assumed that she'd gotten into Gryffindor because of something positive inside of her, not some, some—_process of elimination_. Not that she wasn't good enough for the other three but still had to be shoved somewhere. Wasn't that what Candidus had said? Too stupid for Ravenclaw, too vicious for Hufflepuff, too lost for Slytherin?

Granted she wasn't ambitious, but wasn't she at least cunning? Hadn't she outmaneuvered Dumbledore and wasn't her entire year dancing to a tune of her choosing?

No, that was her power, which she needed to conceal—which needed to be concealed. Its needs superseded hers. And what were her needs? What did she really _want_? To sit in a clubhouse reading and eating? To live a life unbothered by others?

Fortuna knew she didn't just lack ambition, she was its antithesis. Everything either came easily to her or was impossibly out of reach, and there hadn't been anything but a dull sense of obligation pushing her towards action.

The Hat had laughed at the idea she might be fit for Ravenclaw, but _that _wasn't fair, was it? Without her power...well, she'd nearly fail history of magic and get only "Acceptables" in herbology and astronomy, but she was still clever enough, and her power had nothing to do with her success in transfiguration. That was all her, and shouldn't that count?

But she knew it wouldn't, not by the Sorting Hat's measures, because she wasn't interested in learning things as such—not in hoarding facts like Candidus did or in synthesizing snatches of knowledge to create more like Flavia hoped to. She wasn't _curious_, didn't value knowledge for its own sake. Even her exercise with the mystery books was simply to relieve boredom. In fact, she got _annoyed _when she deduced the solution before the detective could reveal the killer's identity.

Wit beyond measure was not her greatest treasure.

Neither was anything that distinguished Hufflepuffs, who were by definition undistinguished. At their most remarkable, they demonstrated persistence and hard work—two things she'd never needed in her life. In their most usual state, they were simply warm and friendly, and she…wasn't.

The whole concept of even _having_ friends was new to her; Hogwarts could have been another foster home—she could have been thrown into the first (only) group that would have accepted her, thrust into the social dynamics of a gang of unsupervised children, lost in a system that only cared so much whether she even existed, let alone what she did.

She was taking steps to prevent that, but she was forced to admit she couldn't fit into a group that was based on whatever fueled Angelique. She enjoyed her classmates and enjoyed spending time with them, but on her own terms, in her own ways. She didn't really connect with them, didn't like hugging or joking around, and either dominated or drifted through most conversations.

In the end, caring for them with the means she had at her disposal meant protecting them.

When she got back to Gryffindor Tower, she conjured an ice pack to hold against the bump that was rising from where the sword had hit her.

* * *

Madam Pince threw them out of the library, ostensibly because they were wilder than a herd of centaurs, but actually (according to Fortuna's power) because the sight of so many children getting their grubby little hands all over her nice books had been about to give her an aneurysm.

They spilled out into the hallway, grumbling about whose fault it was. It wasn't anyone's but Madam Pince's, but Fortuna couldn't exactly share that, and her classmates bickered around her.

"You shouldn't have raised your voice," Astoria told Candidus.

"Angelique shouldn't have written her essay on the wrong goblin rebellion," he sniffed.

"Well, they're all pretty much the same. The wizards treated the goblins like toadstools and the goblins rebelled and the wizards fought them. What else is there to it?"

"What else is there to it! Why, I would _hope _that you would know the difference between the 1309 rebellions over illegal galleon creation and the 1682 rebellion over the legitimacy of the goblin nation in Wizengamot law. Not to even speak of the heroic acts that you'd read about, like the works of the wizard Gerith who managed to defeat an entire rebellion with a cleverly planned rockslide or the bureaucratic wunderkind Richard Knobbledon who miraculously stopped a war through swift political plays and incomprehensibly tough to understand treatises!"

Everybody had stopped paying attention less than halfway through this, but he went on, caught up in the wave of his own enthusiasm. "The goblin nation had been ready to attack on an act of technicality, but wisely Richard leaped into action and went through the entire treatise set between goblins and humans. At the first war meeting, Richard brought along a little known sub-section which prohibited the use of thrice smelted metal into certain districts due to the proliferation of substandard and shoddy equipment. Now of course the goblins weren't using any, but the action meant that _they_ were the ones in violation and had to pay a—"

"Oh never mind," Jessica decided, "Just leave the thing as it is, Angelique, that bloody ghost won't be able to tell the difference anyway. I've been copying outta the book for three weeks and he marked the whole thing as fine."

"Is _that _how you managed to make your paper so concise?" Candidus said, clearly unsure whether to be more offended by the cheating or the abrupt dismissal of his lecture.

"We need an alternative to the library," Fortuna cut in.

"There are loads of abandoned classrooms," Flavia said, taking a cue from Fortuna's subject change. "We could take one for ourselves."

The proposal enthused Jessica nearly as much as goblin rebellions had enthused Candidus. "Yeah," she exclaimed, jabbing her wand in the air. "If we didn't have that vulture breathing down our necks, we could get into combat practice! Dueling! Yuh!"

"There is no combat practice on the curriculum," one of Angelique's hangers-on from Hufflepuff pointed out.

"And I don't think I'm ready for it," Angelique said meekly.

"All the more reason to practice," Astoria said. "And it will mean we'll be ahead of everyone else when we do start learning."

Everyone else seemed to like the idea of dueling, and they immediately started squabbling over where they should start. The seventh floor had the most abandoned classrooms, but it was too far away from the Hufflepuff and Slytherin common rooms to be fair. They eventually settled on the third floor.

"This is like herding cats," Flavia muttered.

"No," Fortuna said. "Cats are cute and don't talk back."

"Cats don't need to talk back," Flavia said, then raised her voice. "Right, everyone, I'm assigning duties."

She briskly paired their classmates up and sent them off down different hallways, until only she and Fortuna remained.

"Well, that gives us plenty of time to wait," Flavia said before sitting down on the floor and taking out a potions textbook.

"Did you really need to trick them all to do that?"

"Of course not! I was never intending to trick anyone. I was quite serious, I'm not intending to stay here all afternoon bouncing from classroom to classroom until the group falls apart out of sheer boredom. We are going to get this done as quickly as possible."

For a moment, Fortuna considered using her power to search for a suitable location. But no, their little groups could find it easily enough. She sat down next to Flavia, opened her own backpack, and started writing letters.

"What are you doing?" Flavia asked.

"The same thing you just did," Fortuna said. "I'm tricking a bunch of people into doing my work for me." She then explained her desire to learn how to get past memory charms, and how she thought putting them in touch with each other might yield results.

"How'd you get their names?" Flavia asked.

"Uh," Fortuna said. She hadn't been expecting the question, which was her own fault.

"Uh?"

"I asked an older student," she said, deliberately evasive while she consulted her power for a way to escape. "I asked Hermione and she helped me find an old casebook. I went through and sent an owl to everyone who's still alive."

"Hermione?" Flavia considered the bait, then took it. "The Hermione from our suspect list? Why not ask a teacher?"

"The teachers are also on our suspect list," Fortuna countered. "And if Hermione thinks I'm getting too close to the truth, she can't make me go to the hospital wing and get bumped off by Madam Pomfrey."

Flavia nodded sagely. "I take it you've been reading American mystery novels?"

Fortuna reached into her bag and pulled out _The Dain Curse_. "Well-deduced, milord."

"It was elementary, Bunter." Flavia basked in her own cleverness and forgot about Fortuna's slipup.

Still. Careless.

She'd finished a quarter of her letters when an echoing "Ooo!" from Angelique bounced its way down the halls.

She and Flavia packed up and hurried to the source of the sound, where they were soon joined by the other groups of explorers.

"It looks perfect!"

And it did. Fortuna's power told her the classroom Angelique had claimed had once been used for the dueling club. It was large enough to fit not only their existing group, but any other people who might want to join in the future. Chairs, targets, as well as the occasional knick knacks that may have come into play for experienced duelists lined the walls, but left plenty of room in the middle.

The study group threw bags into chairs as they piled in and searched around the room.

"Told you we'd find something," Jessica said with a smirk.

Angelique found a box of old Quidditch supplies, including robes, in a cupboard. She emptied them onto the floor at once. "Let's make a banner with our club name!"

"We have a name?" Derek or Zachary asked.

"Sure, if we think of one," Zachary or Derek answered. "What about the First Years' Study Club?"

Astoria disagreed. "The name should reflect our values."

"Our values?"

"Superiority," Astoria said, as though it was obvious.

"_Academic_ superiority," Fortuna said quickly. "Achieved through hard work and friendship."

"Superiority," Jessica said. "We should be a duelling club, too. We can be Hogwarts United."

"United against _what_?" Astoria asked.

Jessica shook her head disapprovingly. Then she scoffed and shook her head some more.

"How about the Hogwarts United Study Club?" Angelique said, focusing everyone back on task.

"Rubbish," Jessica said.

"Why can't we just call ourselves The Club?" asked Astoria. "Anyone worthy of knowing what it meant would know what it meant."

"Perhaps a literal name isn't ideal," Candidus said. "We should be going for something with a bit more thought put into it. How about Witches' Cauldron?"

Fortuna felt annoyance lance through her. "Absolutely not," she said, more harshly than she would have if she'd considered before speaking.

When she noticed everyone staring at her, she quickly asked her power to provide her the name that would best defuse arguments.

"Toil and Trouble?" she offered.

"Oh, like from the Scottish play!" Angelique squealed, clapping her hands together.

"You're familiar with the Bard?" Candidus asked, his surprise a little too evident.

"Are you familiar with my fists?" Jessica demanded, as Fortuna kicked him in the shin.

Abusing him wasn't necessary to keep their group together or advance any of her other agendas, but she thought it would do him some good.

Missing the insult to her intelligence and the others' intervention, Angelique merely answered him. "My mum's an actress. Lady Scottish Play is her favorite role, but I like Juliet better."

"Ah," Candidus said. "You know you can say _her _na—"

"We know," Jessica said, cutting him off. "Now look over our herbology essays."

He did, and Fortuna and Angelique worked on the banner while Candidus evaluated everyone's attempts at describing shrivelfig. On the whole, he felt they were insufficiently laudatory.

Angelique and Fortuna finished the banner at around the same time Candidus wrapped up his comments on each of their essays, and he and Jessica collaborated to hoist the banner over the blackboard at the front of the classroom.

The name had been done in large block lettering, with sparking wands and steaming cauldrons running across the bottom and along the sides. Perhaps it was a little silly, but Angelique was quite obviously a skilled artist and it _did _tie the room together.

"It's stupid," Flavia whispered into her ear.

"It's charming," Fortuna whispered back.

"Right," Flavia said. "Your theory that school is about frivolous clubs and childish antics."

"I've tested the hypothesis by experimentation and I haven't falsified it."

Flavia wasn't going to give in so easily. "The Shrieking Shack is still a much better secret spot for working."

"Of course," Fortuna agreed. "But it's just for us."

"And I'm still not entirely sold on this group in practice."

"Of course," Fortuna agreed. "But look, Zachary-or-Derek wants help on his potions essay."

"It's Derek," Flavia said with a sigh, and sallied forth.

Fortuna checked. Either it was Zachary, or even her power didn't care.

She looked at the students working; the Hufflepuffs discussing Potions with Flavia, Candidus stuffing his giant herbology books into his bag, Astoria and Jessica menacing a target dummy. If Fortuna hadn't known any better, she'd say it looked like a functional study group—a group of students whose study and understanding of threats in their world would no longer be annually disrupted.

And that meant her intervention had been worth it, didn't it?


End file.
